There are higher-quality voices available for download.
I also wish there was a way to see a small preview without action, similar to WebOS notifications.
There are two background notification types: notifications, which are the things in the icon bar, and toasts, which appear over top of the screen, and go away on their own. So there is a way to do that, even if the app doesn't provide it as an option. You're at least in part talking about built-in apps, so that doesn't push the blame elsewhere; I'm just letting you know that there is another option available to developers.
Doing normal hunt and peck typing on swype was definitely worse then the iPhone touch keyboard
Or the default Android keyboard, in my experience. I never could adapt to Swype or its clones.
I've got certain ones on my iPhone that just simply can't exist on Android pre 2.2, such as handheld console equivalent games with lots of assets.
Actually, only the executable has to be on the internal storage. Data can exist anywhere. This is at the discretion of the developer, though.