Use: porn, impressing the ladies with how cool I am.

Well the bar for qualifying can't be too high if they are talking about 70 million payouts; how many people could have left Verizon?

Except they can give you ads every time you listen to the song, while with iTunes they have only chance to get your money.
Duh.

Whats wrong with ABS?
Do you enjoy longer stopping distances?

Umm have you heard of the Monad Powershell?
Released by Microsoft its a very powerful CLI.

Presumably wherever you work has electricity as well, so you can plug in when you get to work.

Are you freaking kidding me?
No optical drive? How are people supposed to listen to their CDs? (I'm sure that a lot of the people who are buying this thing have actual physical cds)
Flash storage? WHY? Do you want to simultaneously make it both more expensive and have less storage?
Hard drives don't use that much power so you won't save much there and people might actually want to store their photos on this machine (using the media card reader you want) and flash storage won't cut it.

ARGH I just bought a 1610

Actually operating shock specs on harddrives are more than 70 gs. (http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX18979(ME).aspx) not 10.
No "heavy bump" will damage a harddrive, this is not 1970.
Sure, they are more vulnerable to damage, but LCDs are more vulnerable than CRTs and I don't see anyone clamoring for more CRT based devices. SSDs are extremely expensive and don't offer nearly enough diskspace for anyone with an extensive collection of music/movies/porn. Someday we'll have free, fast, wireless connections everywhere and mobile devices won't need to store media and you can have all your media in the cloud or on spinning disks at home, but that day is still a long way to go.

On what basis do you claim that the Android SDK is "discouraging anything with higher than QVGA"
You are aware that you can change the simulator to HVGA mode right? And that all the hardware prototypes of HVGA as well?
Sure sounds like they don't want you to use HVGA ....