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My father gave me one, I put RaspBMC on it because it seemed like the easiest way to get Debian on it.

Huh? The official Raspberry Pi distribution is Debian compiled for ARMv6.

so far the best way is to edit code/configs/scripts on a local desktop/laptop then ftp it them over, cause even basic text editors bring the PI to a slow crawl.

If you're running 'pico', you're getting 'nano' instead, and it's nano's syntax highlighting that's the problem. Switch it off with Meta-Y and the editor becomes positively speedy. I'm SSH'ed into a Pi right now, and for basic shell stuff it's pretty indistinguishable from any other machine. There's probably something up if it's gratuitously slow.

(I'm on an up-to-date Raspbian, and I've overclocked things slightly. Software has improved loads the past few months!)

I was gonna use the PI as a network storage device, chaining 3 or 4 external usb hard drives to it via powered usb hub, and it worked and all but the PI is soooooo slow the transfer rate would dip down to 5K-10K/sec over LAN when trying to save a large file or copy a large file from it to desktop.

USB support is now merely 'not very good', while it used to be 'downright terrible'. I get ~3MB/s SCP-ing a large file to the Pi's (slow) SD card, so network performance shouldn't be an issue. Try again with recently updated firmware? Although it's unlikely to make a terribly good NAS anyway, with both disks and ethernet hanging off a slow USB connection...

The port is necessary because the official Debian Wheezy armhf release is compatible only with versions of the ARM architecture later than the one used on the Raspberry Pi (ARMv7-A CPUs and higher, vs the Raspberry Pi's ARMv6 CPU).

Yes, http://archive.raspbian.org/raspbian/pool/main/g/gcc-4.7/gcc-4.7_4.7.1-2%2Brpi1.diff.gz shows that they modified the gcc-4.7 package to generate code for ARMv6:

+gcc-4.7 (4.7.1-2+rpi1) wheezy; urgency=low
+
+ * Set defaults for raspbian (ARMv6+VFP)
+ * Disable testsuite
+
+ -- Peter Michael Green Sun, 01 Jul 2012 13:20:21 +0000

Can't reach http://www.raspbian.org/ -- maybe already slashdotted. Google seems to confirm this address is correct.

If it were a more standard flavor of Linux, like a regular Debian kernel, I'd definitely prefer it over Android.

You're in luck - the Debian image is currently the recommended one on the downloads page.

(I've no idea what the 'official' educational version will be running, but from the distributions I've played round with so far, Debian is probably the most complete. Although I have switched to the go-faster-stripes Raspbian, which is very similar from a usage point of view.)

I ordered on the same launch day - and had a Raspberry Pi arrive in the US in early May. And the following day had a second Raspberry Pi arrive. Oops.

(Wracked with guilt, I donated the second one to the Raspbian project, which is a nifty recompilation of Debian to take full advantage of the Pi's FPU. On floating-point-heavy stuff, there are quite dramatic improvements...)