Oh yes. A specialized cable and software, real easy and flexible. The one thing I hated about my iPad mini (which I lost ) was the cable and iTunes. With USB you can use a standard cable that pretty much anyone has, and you don't need any software for it, the OS can handle it just fine by itself.
That doesn't bother me, if it bothers you then to each his own. FYI I think Apple's working on wireless syncing
Again, you know what they told you. Real-life use is very different from keynote speeches and presentations. I've only seen a couple of presentations that reflected the actual experience, most were by Microsoft. Win98, blue screen of death and everything
They didn't just say: "our multi-tasking is better" they explained why, and it makes perfect sense. It's not a complex demo like that of an OS, it's one feature in an existing OS. And the Keynote is targeted towards developers, so they are very thorough in explaining how everything works and how easy it is to implement in an existing app.

Multi-tasking on iOS 4 (watch up to the 25-30 second mark on the video): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e7K1oP9YVg
The reason it doesn't drain the battery significantly is because the app isn't really running in the background like on other devices, the app is programmed to support particular types of multi-tasking for whatever that app needs, fast app switching (resuming where you left off) being the quickest to implement.

The seven different types of multitasking available:
http://thenextweb.com/apple/2010/04/...ing-iphone-40/.
They will cover everything an app needs to run in the background, without having a significant impact on battery life or performance.
Again. No real-life use there for either of us, just presentations. And if you want to go by track record, all other options (Windows, Linux, Android, Symbian...) have much more experience with it when it comes to mobile devices.
You don't need examples of real-life use when the feature itself is so simple, you double tap to activate, find the app you want, and switch.

And, I do actually have iOS 4.0 on my iPhone 3GS. I'm a developer, so I do have real-life usage, and I find myself using multi-tasking all the time even though it's only the Apple apps that actually support it, all my other apps don't, but it's still better because it's in my multi-tasking menu (faster to get to what I want, rather than flicking through pages).
And I'm sure the hundreds of thousands of apps in Apple Store are all exceptional and great. No rubbish? And how do you get around that? Same as for any other software, reviews, popularity etc.
Thats true, reviews, popularity, etc., show which apps are good or not. But that wasn't my point, my point was, how many of those 50k apps that are unfiltered are really rubbish, malicious, or don't do as they are advertised?
You don't get those in the App Store, you do have useless apps but only to an extent because of Apple's control.

And what about malicious apps? Can they exist?

iOS 4 will be out soon, so there will be some demos on YouTube of it.