The ability to modify said settings through the graphical settings interface.

Also, that still doesn't allow one to customize date notation.

Why? Are you changing this 3 times a week? If you are lucky someone has 2h to spare & it's done and, but...

Perhaps I don't want to search high and low to figure out which country uses my favorite date notation as a default, and which variable goes with that. Can you tell me? yyyy/mm/dd please, comma as decimal separator, period as thousands separator.
Perhaps some people don't even want to resort to the terminal for something this basic.

No i can't tell on the drop of a hat; that's what your favorite $LIBRARY is for. If you need to know something, research. If you don't want to resort to the terminal, please show me one mobile OS that supports you in doing this (cherry-picking various parts from regional settings). Hint: Not even most of the true Desktops OS do it.

(If one would to, it could be possible to read your post as "i am too lazy to look it up by myself even if this would allow me to set it up the way i want it as an outcome, so someone else should implement a nanny-GUI for it.")

1: A button in multitask view to close all open apps.

Requests for GUI interfaces are not unreasonable.

The reason most interfaces now are purpose-constructed GUI is because they are simpler, more intuitive, less error-prone, and most of all, time-efficient.

Lectures about "research and do it the hard way" seem to indicate having more time than typical users, and an inability to appreciate practical use by the majority who are outside of geek culture.

Sure it's not entirely unreasonable. But this always depends on the effort needed and the overall time saved by this.

If you want to change it three times a week, sure there are some minutes saved.

If you want to set it up and forget it, this will probably be implemented only if the developer who does this has more time than typical developers and is perhaps a bit bored.

By the way, i'm also hindered by my inability to understand the majority of Americans that just want a sleek and simple / dumb feature-less interface that has oh-so fluid animations; but that's very OT anyway.

(No, i'm actually having not that much time giving that the time before Christmas is one of the busiest for my employer and i'm traveling ca. 20-25% of the year, and besides that i just started to learn LaTeX this week, to avoid the stupidity/control-lessness that are office suite-type word processors. No efforts, no cake)

1. hildon desktop to be able to lock on portrait orientation
2. a decent virtual keyboard
3. wallpaper selector for landscape and portrait, each orientation has it own wallpaper that would be sooo nice!
thats all from me

Not really sure what you're trying to say here, but the N900 is my first ever smartphone, and as long as it serves me well, it will be my only one. So I can't speak from experience with the other platforms. Just because they don't do it, doesn't make it the way it should be.
Both Windows and Mac OS X do pretty decent customization, actually. As for Linux; I guess it depends on your desktop environment and graphical toolkit. To be fair, Xubuntu doesn't do a great job at it.

Yes, that's why on top of researching it, I'm posting a request in a thread that no developer that's putting serious time into the CSSU might even look into. But yeah, shame on me for coming up with an appealing idea for the next CSSU as opposed to bashing on the ideas of others.

And if five thousand people change it but twice a year, count out the minutes saved.

Locking the screen in portrait mode.