It's adequate for big-three (Intel, nVidia, AMD) which solves 95% desktop problems. It's passable for ARM-based platforms. So fallback is needed for 1% of real hardware and some percent of virtual machines. Most virtualisation platforms support 3D accel for Linux.
Besides, how much power do you need to display few textured rectangles?

Vista was released in 2006. Six years in IT industry is eternity. So "always had ASLR" is basically true.

You need good filesystem, with embedded data checksum and self-healing using redundant copies. For Linux - btrfs is fine. For Mac OS X & Linux - ZFS.

Thats OK, apparently Wayland is not for you. It is for distribution makers to integrate into OS. So dont worry, you should not care about Wayland. Leave it to technically knowledgable people to decide when it should be made available to casual users.

There's a great quote I saw recently:

General: "So, how do we get Stuxnet 2 in Iran? USB sticks won't do it any more"
Sergeant: "What if we crash land an infected drone there?"

Like http://www.samygo.tv/ ?

Now, they're talking about double-clicking on icon of .iso file in any decent desktop environment.

So it means that MeeGo is even more dead? Intel was last standing supporter if it, and now Intel is interested in different, competing OS. Sad.

Mainline Linux supports 4096 CPU cores for almost two years now.

There are env variables. See example under “Settings”: http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/xdg-user-dirs

None. Typical user shouldn't mess with things set up by distro. How many non-power users want to change localisation of “My Documents” in Windows?
If user need to change the directory he should ask someone knowledgable enough or be able to navigate hidden directories and use text editor.

Nb. there is xdg-user-dirs-gtk for handling migration after language change.

WTH?? Why are you avoiding mechanism which is in place for those things, namely XDG user dirs? Shotwell, as every good behaving application, uses directory which user defined for storing pictures. This define can be changed with command

  xdg-user-dirs-update --set PICTURES [folder you care about]

Or by editing ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.

They are in third world, like in India.

Meantime, the rest of the world doesn't know what "dropped call" is. It only happens in extreme situations (New Year's Eve celebration, nationwide disasters etc.). Of course one can argue that "quality" of US cell networks is nationwide disaster.

There are few contenders between Droid's 25 and iPhone's 325: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_displays_by_pixel_density
There are entries about and over 300 dpi.