flash drives are a good storage medium and you can do fun things with them. like take off hte outer casing and put it into anything with suitable design, max size you can get though is 64gb but flash drives don't get very hot. my PC's HDD is at 31degrees and i'm sure a flash would stay at like 25. soon 128gb flash might appear and then people would consider actually installing their OS on it etc. as you can mount certain storage disks onto different parts of linux and such so you could have your flash drive as being /tmp/ and such but unfortunately windows isn't so feature rich

. USB 3.0 is right around the corner and more power is going to be able to be transferred and much better speed would come, but the transition will be slow from usb 2.0 to 3.0 as most manufacturers will still do usb 2.0 and most motherboards will not support it at first.