The Mk2 software is currently very very close to the mk1 stuff; we've been so busy with other projects (which have tighter deadlines) that a lot of the things we wanted to get in there for mk2 first ship just didn't make it.
We're working on the new features, they will come - a lot of your comments are wishlist features though. Mk2 specifics like making the volume knob work at a better speed will be in very quickly.
The developer image is unlikely to grow telnet, etc, as this adds a lot to the size of the image; we may make available a tar file which would extract over the normal image and contained extra goodies. One problem is that the DHCP client/etc is all within the player (dhcpc is *huge!*).
Hugo