I cant answer your second question, but in regard to the first, release of July 2010 is actually quite good. It works on older hardware and is one of the few linux distributions that works with LXDE (
http://lxde.org/) out of the box. Hardware detection is good. The load times are not as good as raved about, and the concept of using office tools via the web is maybe not novel, but is quite well implemented. You need to be set up with Gmail however in order to use these applications. It is an end-user environment with the multimedia applications that come with it and there is a bug in LXTerminal.