There are past projects that might make a person wary of an unproven company trying to produce a console. There's the Phantom, which is fairly infamous. And the Open Pandora guys still haven't manufactured enough consoles to even fulfill preorders, several years on.
Yes, but we're talking about a project being designed by one of the more famous industrial designers in the world, who also works for other hardware manufacturers (Jawbone, for example), and more than likely has a very deep network of hardware manufacturing contacts to draw upon. Just because some projects failed doesn't mean every related project will fail - unless the assumption here is that the only companies capable of bringing a console of any sort to market are MS, Sony, and Nintendo these days.
Yes, but it doesn't hurt to be skeptical. Everyone who pledges should know they're paying for a product that doesn't exist yet and currently has no confirmed games. The project description does everything it can to gloss that over, and even outright lies in some places (like with the Minecraft thing).
