I hope this doesn't mean you will only work in a dynamic address allocation scheme ? What about statically allocated network address schemes? What if there is no available IP lease on the DHCP managed subnet you connect to? There are a number of DHCP-related issues that many people will not want to have to deal with.

I don't use DHCP in my network due to the difficulty of operating within a suitable DNS scheme, so it would be infinitely preferable if I could use the conventional ipconfig method to attach IP parameters to the eth0 NIC from the command line.

This does imply that this would only be available to system images with a command shell available via serial, ie. Developer. The Consumer image would not provide any way of getting to ipconfig.

Could you consider the idea of setting the IP address/subnet mask/gateway via Emplode? This would make it infinitely more flexible (and useful).