It is all well and good chatting about the platform, but what can this thing do? The best way to see is to watch the demonstration video below:

This is pretty exciting stuff. The key points that I gleaned out of this video were:

• Webkit browser: The browser shown uses Webkit and has rich touch screen interaction with the fancy phone. The visual history is really nice too. It is great to see a full browser built in, a la iPhone. This can be a great gateway to getting a nice interface to users
• OpenGL: When you need more, you can get really low level. The world time application uses shows this off, and then you see Quake in action. A great platform for mobile games!
• Street view in the Google Maps application looks fantastic
• How the various applications integrate with each other, allowing you to share Services via Intents
• The Notifications really nice
• Noticing the differences between the simpler model, and the fancier model.

The key is a fully fledged API to get as low level as you want to build very rich applications for mobile.

Oh, and did you get to the end of the video? You should. An Android Developer Challenge will award money from a pool of $10 million dollars to developers who build great apps for Android.

Slightly different to another platform that makes you hack it to get an SDK to build applications?