So, to summarize your rather lengthy post consisted of repeating the same sentence in as many ways as humanly possible - people are magpies, they go for the shiny, flashy things? Ok, I tend to agree with that actually...

However, about the cheering masses on the Nokia WP7 concept @ Engadget, you might want to check their Disqus profiles - most of them, especially the high-praising ones, are single-comment only participants, specifically joined/registered to post that one comment. Now I'm not saying that Nokia or Microsoft were sending drones to praise the concept - which would not be all that unbelievable as I highly doubt they'd release the concept pics prior to last night at MWC, but given the rapid stock value decline they needed some positive feedback - but I'd bet that most of those are coming from either .NET developers or WP fan-page forums that are there to praise Microsoft, not Nokia.