Both tethering and custom notifications are available with some really nice homebrew apps.
Lack of searching with the onscreen dial pad bothers me as well. Though you can whip out the keyboard and search that way, just adds a step for no reason IMO. However, I can imagine most of your gripes being addressed with updates from palm. If not I'm sure the development community will step in. I see no reason why we can't get custom dialers, homescreens, email apps, etc. on this thing.
As of right now I can't really have a solid opinion on battery life. I just got mine yesterday afternoon. Drained it down and charged it up once. It'll need some more calibration before I know how well it's gonna treat me. So far today after my 1st cycle I'm down to 10% after 8 hours. I've played with the phone quite a bit, used web for over an hour, used tweed a few times, some SMS's and a few phone calls. If I don't get decent battery life I may pickup one of these as people on precentral.net have already had some success with it:
http://www.fommy.com/view-full-page....re&skuno=83629