Excellent article. I think that android should actually go a step further, and give users the ability to impose restrictions on applications. So, I install an app that requires permission to access my contacts, but I should be able to tell the OS to block those requests (perhaps just showing the application an empty contact list), and so on. This would allow the user to have control over these sorts of issues without the cooperation of the app developer. Of course, one of the settings would be whether an application can launch a service/etc. Obviously disabling some of these features could disable aspects of the application, and users would need to live with this.

Memory and background task management is a big problem in android. Sure, features like imap push and the like are handy, but not when it means that you have 50 applications all competing for RAM on a G1.