Because the next release is an LTS, which will now be supported for 5 years. If couchdb is kept for the next release, it will need to be supported to another 5 years.

After spending a lot of time benchmarking, this only holds true on http. On https, the overhead of the SSL negotiation kills what you gain very quickly.

Yes, Google and the orginal source, The New York Times.

I don't think they meant it in a "Democrat vs Republican" sense, but rather internal company politics (ie, focusing on certain aspects of the project because it's good for a promotion).

If that where the case, then couchdb is not the smartest way to do it, considering that each user has it's own DB. Cross-referencing anything from user to user is incredibly expensive (load-wise) and hard to do ;)
Canonical could be after world domination and selling data to the CIA, or we could be trying to provide a valuable service to users. Who knows.

No. We partnered with Funambol to provide this service, and it carries a significant cost to both develop and maintain and scale this specific service, as the announcement says.
Supporting hundreds of different mobile phones is an incredibly expensive task, and on top of that we've added a layer that saves those contacts to couchdb and replicates them locally for you, to be used with any application you wish.
While we all love and use free software, it's completely unreasonable to demand that services be provided for free. The service also provides a 30 day free trial, where you can perform a one-time sync if you wish to have a backup of your contacts.

I personally believe that allowing people to sync their contacts from almost any mobile phone into a Linux desktop is a huge step forward.

Just so everybody is aware, the servers are quite overloaded at the moment, so expect all kinds of timeouts. We didn't expect so many testers :)
We will be slowly bringing it back in it's feet, so patience is welcomed.

Mark put together this process from the start to ensure a healthy community that could grow. it seems to have worked wonders so far.

I am a member of one of the membership boards (Americas board)
No, Ubuntu Members are people who contribute to Ubuntu directly, not indirectly. There is a lot of work involved in getting Ubuntu out the door every 6 months, and membership recognizes the people who help do that in a direct way.
That said, upstream developers and Debian developers have the advantage of already knowing how a lot of things work, so they will probably have a higher chance of getting through than anyone else (there are separate councils for community involvement and technical involvement).

This is the full exact source code launchpad.net runs.

It's pretty close: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/business/11ubuntu.html?pagewanted=3&_r=2&ref=business