I agree about Apple's app store. I can understand why they like it from their perspective, but from a user's perspective it does nothing but frustrate me.

I look at the Android app store (the official one) as something similar to Nokia showcasing applications they like on the Tablet home page. It has a payment mechanism built-in (a rather unsuccessful one if you believe the reports about how few android users will actually purchase apps), but the fact that I can install any .apk file that I download onto my phone makes me feel good.

Someone else above mentioned the lengths Archos goes to lock-in the user, and while I can't speak to their past antics (I've never been remotely tempted to purchase one of their devices), I think they'll have a hard time doing that with Android. At the very least, it defeats the purpose of using the platform, as the whole idea is that vendors don't need to spend resources developing the internals of the software. If you look at what other vendors are doing with Android (Motorola and HTC) they are basically just writing custom interfaces to run on top of it, as a way to differentiate (and pretty it up, because Android, like all things Google, is very much an engineer-driven OS).

I know they are fond of selling codec support, which is a little bootleg, but forgivable.

I'm not particularly interested in the Archos device, but I think it represents the first of a large number of new Android-powered devices (not just phones).

and to answer your other question, I live in Upper Northwest.