We too would love to build hardware to market along those lines, though, of course, such initiatives require talent we don't have access to right now and costs we can't afford. One day though... :)
By the way, I'd definitely encourage you to get involved with elementary. New collaborators are always welcome, and it seems like you've got a lot of our same design principles in mind.
Right now I have some experience in PCB design and I am just building my skills to design full blown ARM and i7 based laptops to cover both low/high end markets.
By the way, I'd definitely encourage you to get involved with elementary. New collaborators are always welcome, and it seems like you've got a lot of our same design principles in mind.
Have a look here: http://elementaryos.org/get-involved