I think Android has a lot of great possibilities, but putting it on the list of best OSes of the decade is similar to giving Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. I'm not saying it doesn't deserve being on the list, I just think it is a bit premature.

Call me old fashion, but I am a firm believer of do on thing and to it well. Your list of requests have a very broad scope and it wasn't clear if you expected one software package to do all of it. There are many great open source software packages for use with business.

GnuCash is an excellent accounting system to help you keep your financial accounts organized. I'm not really sure what is entailed with 'issuing a W-2' other than handing your employee a form. I have seen various companies use a combination wiki, dms and cms, all of which have many open source choices, to organize corporate data, and serve it in an clean and clear fashion to interested parties.

As far as tax filing software, it looks like this is not a foreign question to slashdot:

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/03/09/011259

One of the products offered in the above link is: http://opentaxsolver.sourceforge.net/ Open Tax Solver

I am unclear what you mean by legal template. If you mean pre-formated document, OpenOffice.org has a large collection of templates you can browse through. If you mean canned agreements and contracts, they are around on the web, if you search for them. I must add IANAL so be careful using any generalized contract.

There are many products that fall under the "groupware" environment that are more standards compliant and easier to maintain than MS exchange. Exchange has long flouted many mail standards, locked you into using Outlook, and among other things is a bear to maintain on a large scale. The unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it will" can, and does, work well to achieve the same functionality:

LDAP for addressbooks
Choose your own IMAP server
Choose your own MTA
Choose your content scanner
Choose your webmail package
Choose your calendar server
(do I need to continue?)

While I admit calendaring is a little shaky as of right now. Things in this arena have been changing drastically over the past 1 to 2 years. Looking at packages like lightning and chandler for clients, and davical, cosmo, Apple iCal server and others. There is a very powerful product that I have not explored yet that does bring all these pieces together called SOgo (Scalable Open Groupware). These options are not perfect but do follow standards and are easier to fit into your work process.

This is great news for the F/OSS world. It will come down to how one defines "no significant overall cost difference". I assume this can be spun to fit anyone's needs. So I guess I am in the wait-and-see camp to see how far the governement moves into the Open Source world.

While I can appreciate your sentiment, you *can't* get a decent laptop for $500. You can get a laptop that will run XP or GNU/Linux or *BSD for $500. But the world uses Windows, and if you are going to be running Vista well, you are looking at $800 for the laptop. And while, that is phenomenal, TFA is trying to convey that over the next few months they want to take the $800 laptop and make it cost $500, and that $500 desktop to cost $400. Industries hurting now don't care where we are going to be in 100 years or even how far we have come in 10. The industry has been chasing this ever increasing sliding scale of performance. Consumers have benefited by getting more powerful machines.

Oddly enough, Moore's observations are still viable, but it is the economy that is going to slow the trend. Demand is shifting from the same price point to one lower. This will cause a momentary dip in the trend. Once the new price point stabalizes Moore's Law will again be relevant.