The extra dialog is the "the phone will power off" after I press and hold the power button, then say yes I wanted to power off. Why the extra dialog? Why not just, well, power off? That's just a small detail that bugged me.

Projecting where it's headed is obviously impossible unless I was directing Android development, my comment was that in terms of a clean and consistent UI, it didn't start well and has only got worse with 2.0/2.1. iPhoneOS and WebOS started clean and elegant - underfeatured yes, but clean and elegant. For Android to get this elegance now requires a lot of stuff to get thrown out and re-done; in my experience that doesn't ever happen after 1.0 because of an ever-pressing release schedule and new feature demands.

Still, we'll see what happens. My guess as I said before is that HTC and others will re-do significant parts of the UI and extend the appeal of Android further - it won't help consistency or 3rd party apps, but individual phones will get nicer.

I do understand that a good gmail client can be critical, though. For any heavy lifting on the iPhone I end up using the mobile gmail web interface which is better than trying to do it all through IMAP...