They mentioned that as well - in their 'Philosophy' section, they said

You are right - there is that, and there is also OpenCores' OpenRISC CPU. However, if one wanted to make an i7, even if one could do the EDL and test vectors, one would still require a patent license from Intel to make this. My larger point above was that Librem made their laptop from an off the shelf Intel part, instead of looking at these sort of alternatives. Which is fine, but then the high horse that they mounted about being pure Libre just sounds disingenuous

I never said that! I said that he's not consistent in his ideology. I do think that he's unreasonably fanatical about liberated software, and that both the current Linux (GPL2) and BSD (BSDL) models are good enough. But since he wrote the standard on being uncompromising - even dumping on standard Linux distros on the GNU page, I brought up the question about hardware, where exactly the same arguments can be used.

chmod +777

Wouldn't that work?

I don't. I just expect consistency from them.

Not really. Imagine if someone did have the money, or owned a 20nm fab, and was perfectly capable of starting a lot on his own. He'd still not be able to whip up an i7, since the netlists and HDL models are Intel proprietary, and not something open, such as OpenCores' OpenRISC CPU.

This is not a problem, but neither is unliberated software. Open Source for an end user is only useful if the user happens to be a programmer who understands it all inside out.

As I mentioned in my previous post above, One Pop-Down RJ45 Network port (r8169) for ethernet, and one 802.11n WiFi (ath9k) - suggesting Realtek and Atheros.

KISS for touchpads would be what they used to do earlier - have a separate switch to turn off the touchpad whenever needed. Unfortunately, some genius at one of the OEMs had the bright idea of losing them

They do mention in their site that they'll source and manufacture the highest quality hardware. In short, they're going for a one-size-fits-all, given that this is a limited market to start with.

On my home laptop, which has no users other than myself, I have a few login accounts for different purposes. One of them is for things like my banking, paying bills, purchases, et al, and that account has a proper password. For all the others, I either have the password as {ENTER}, or I just use the login name as password (if it's an administrator's account that requires a password). Nobody but me will ever get into this computer, so why make it needlessly complicated?

Just hope that the system doesn't insist on you having a combination of letters, numbers, lowercase, uppercase and special characters

... but unheard of, as well

This will be a question similar to the one about running Linux on a MacBook the other day. If you wanna run something like Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, Mageia or Fedora, then why would you get something like this? When you can get an off the shelf laptop from, say, Dell, and then run Linux.

The FSF explains that here

What's a chiklet keyboard? The keyboard on this looks like the one I have on my Inspiron 17 - a separate numeric keypad, which ain't there on most laptops