You know, I kind of suspected we would get the most meaningful feedback on the release from you.

A few thoughts regarding some of the points you've raised:

• Hardy based appliances unlikely to co-exist on the web site with Lucid based appliances: Once we come out with Lucid based appliance, the web site may not advertise the Hardy based images to avoid confusion but they will still be available from sourceforge if anybody is interested. And vice versa, before the Lucid based appliances are officially released we'll probably make betas available on sourceforge while keeping the Hardy based releases on the web site. I'm not ruling out making both versions available in parallel for awhile if there is enough interest from the community, but it would require some work on the web site CMS templates to support that and I fear if we're not careful the end-result would be ugly and confusing.
• We're fully committed to real-world security of the appliances: In fact, we're increasingly using them ourselves internally so the concerns addressed are really our own. Better safe than sorry: something we learned doing computer security for the military.
• Amazon EC2 is a good tool to have in your geek toolbox: You pay for Amazon EC2 instances by the hour. With the Hub it will literally be a click of a button to launch a new appliance with an amazing 1gbit network connection for as long as you need it. Development, demonstration purposes, testing. For example, building 40 appliances on a single machine can take many hours and if you make a mistake you have to start all over again. Instead we launch 40 instances in parallel and get all the appliances built in 20 minutes. We then transfer them to sourceforge at 20MB/s. Then the instances go away and it only costs us a few bucks. Basically you can tap into supercomputing scale powers when you need it from a laptop anywhere in the world and only pay for what you use. Powerful stuff.
• We plan on supporting other clouds as well: The main problem with Amazon EC2 is that the VMs they offer don't start small enough. The smallest instance costs 8.5 cents an hour and has 1.6GB of RAM, 160GB of disk space. For some applications that's overkill. I hope Amazon move to support smaller/cheaper instance sizes but whether or not that happens the Hub will eventually support other cloud providers that do. For example, the smallest Rackspace cloud instance has 256MB RAM and costs just 1.5 cents an hour.
• Giving new life to old machines: It's amazing how well old machines can run with new versions of Ubuntu. The other day I refurbished a P3 with 256MB RAM as a TV media center type appliance. Gnome wouldn't run with that much memory, but LXDE ran just fine. As a headless file server it didn't even break a sweat.
• Linus's law - given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow: Once we come out with the Lucid beta appliances any time you (and others!) can put into helping testing will be a big help.