Most mobile devices draw much more power than 500mA over micro USB as well, I was assuming this was in-spec now, it certainly seems to work fine. And many people have spare 1A+ chargers lying around as mobile devices tend to break before their chargers (ramshackly plug notwithstanding). Those chargers are usually really tiny, as well.

So I think micro USB is a fine choice. It also lets you draw from the fairly rich ecosystem of other USB power gadgets such as external batteries. I'd be really annoyed if they switched to a "normal" round plug.

It will work fine in 95% of the cases, but 5% will ruin their computer USB port, because the PI is not within the specs. The PI not only draws 750mA (old) or 600mA (new) when idle, but much more, if you attach SSD, and USB devices.

The ramshackle micro USB port is a nogo for me.

You don't have to power it from the USB port. You can supply juice to the 5V and GND pins on the GPIO header. That's probably a better power inlet interface than either a ramshackle micro USB connection or a janky barrel plug.

reread the usb spec. it will not ruin the USB port.

Some really old computers have physical fuses on the USB ports that can - and will - blow if you draw too much power from them.

Should probably upgrade, then, before spending more money on Raspberry Pis.

I'm not aware of any spec requirements for overcurrent protection on the host ports (devices have strict power behavior per spec), though they may be there.

I am aware, however, of countless USB host designs that simply put a 5v regulator rail on the power line and could probably be induced to overheat by a misbehaving device.

It's definitely in the USB 1.1 spec, (with some verbiage that excessive current draw on one port is not allowed to affect other ports) though they may have relaxed it later. I have several old Belkin hubs that will terminate (with prejudice) power to any port that draws over 550 mA, until you physically power-cycle the hub. This is annoying for obvious reasons, especially on 7-port hubs with beefy power supplies, so most hub manufacturers don't do that anymore.

What the pi should do is monitor the voltage level of port it is drawing from, if it draws it down, it should turn on a fault LED or disable onboard services (like ethernet and usb).

The whole point is that most people (especially the target market) have a spare USB charger hanging around. The Pi takes exactly the same connector as your mobile phone - it's one less bit of kit to buy.

The Ethernet chip is a new one tho - maybe it's a little less terrible?

(No idea - my applications for the rpi don't depend on it being a speed demon on the network.)

The Ethernet speeds are limited by both the USB bus it's riding on, as well as the slow CPU processing power.

Although, for most of my projects so far, it's been plenty fast.

Any recommendations for similar small/cheap devices with better Ethernet?

Have a look at the Beaglebone Black.

the ethernet chip seems to just be the 4 usb-port version instead of the 2 usb-port version.

If you load U-Boot onto an SD card, the rPi can be configured to use that to boot over Ethernet. It's not a completely "pure" network boot, but that's impossible given the hardware. (There's simply nowhere for a bootloader to live besides the SD card.)

You need some sort of bootloader, even in a traditional PXE boot scenario... it's just that your BIOS hands off to the bootloader on your onboard PXE chip instead of to your OS's bootloader, etc. So, it's chain-booting no matter how you slice it.

You can setup your SD card to have U-Boot and not much else... just what's necessary for U-Boot to, well, boot. Then it takes over and does it's network boot of your full OS. So you can get a sort-of PXE boot setup.

Yes I agree, the Ethernet is the one thing (other than the price in Australia) that stops me from using a pi