When Android surfaced, it did not look blatantly like the iPhone. That is, until the Galaxy appeared. From the moment I saw a Galaxy prototype it was obvious: they were going to get sued.
Whether or not the iOS vs Android war makes sense at a high level is an interesting discussion, but this is pretty simple: Samsung practically begged to be the first to get sued. There isn't a lot to say about it after that.
I don't get the frequent comparisons (mostly by bloggers) between Rails and Node.js. The things you most want Node.js for you don't really want to be doing in Rails, and vice-versa.
That's a pretty self-indulgent rant. I've got nothing against the ultimate decision by any means, but that decision is being rationalized -- and rationalized poorly.
8GB of RAM costs $39. If the OPs time is worth so little that they'd rather stew for 5-10 minutes every day waiting for repair permissions to finish, then that's simply their choice. FWIW, I haven't done anything like that on my 4GB MB Air since I bought it, and it almost never gets rebooted. Granted the SSD makes VM usage a lot more transparent, but still...
The software installation comment displays a lack of understanding of what's going on with the App Store; e.g., it's new, things are still ramping up, etc.
As an aside, my 2-cents to anyone new to the platform is to stay away from MacPorts. It does things just differently enough to make future updates (outside of what they provide, or before they get around to providing it) a potential time-sink to sort out. Not worth it to me; it's easy enough to build what you need, and there are plenty of places for excellent guidance.