I doubt this will get a lot of comments, since pretty much everything he said is spot on.
I do wish I could avoid having to run the emulator just to test my code - it's usually faster to deploy/test on my own phone rather than in the emulator. I don't think they could reasonably get rid of the emulator entirely, but I like the idea the link proposes of having an x86 Android environment for most testing.
Google has stated (at I/O and other places) that there is are improvements to the Eclipse Android IDE (and layout editor) in the works. Timeline is unknown.
