I recognize that for those who need it, there is utility in it. However, I find that we are talking about such a small segment of the population who would find utility in it on very rare occurences.
I mean seriously, how often is you boss asking to look at your phone ? Or how often are you letting strangers play with your phone, so much that you don't want to see that "Cathy sent poked you back" ?
You are right in the sense that shouldn't be mutually exclusive, but sadly they are. It would have been great if they allowed swipe left for a privacy screen and swipe right for a secondary screen. It would have been great it, if there was some option on the privacy screen to add widgets for those that wanted to, but everything they've said has to been to the contrary.
As for your second point ....
..... Half the widgets I am talking about, are for static content and aren't doing any polling (e-mail, calendar, shortcuts, tasks).
Secondly, for a lot of these widgets, it isn't like they are going to be polling at 1 minute intervals. Do you really need to poll weather more than every hour ? What about news ? Every 15 minutes IMO. I can see facebook and the Bloomberg widget requiring really frequent polling.
However, this is being labeled as the ultimate internet device - they should have taken battery life into account. I mean HTC devices don't seem to suffer from checking the weather, checking stocks, PUSH updating your favourite webpages, running an exchange account, having MSN messenger on all day, and having several imap/pop inboxes checked at intervals (this is from my personal experience).
I mean, come on this is supposed to be "the ultimate internet device" not the "ultimate internet device BUT you can only have 1 or 2 dynamic widgets because we didn't think this through or we are concerned about battery life while our competitors have figured it out."
------------------
And just because I've been harsh on this device A LOT today, I'll add something I happened to like while playing with the emulator.
The native mail client now allows you to collapse/expand your e-mails by day/week/etc. This is a good step.