this is referring to the flash ram integrated into the Santa Rosa chipset.
My worry is the flash ram technology won't have at least 5 years of testing before it's released. How will my new mbp act in 5 years when the flash ram slowly dies over time?
100,000 write cycles, not read cycles, is a lot of writing. I do not believe reading from Flash memory damages it. It is going to take a very long time to hit 100,000 write cycles.
Now, I imagine that if some of the Flash cells should fail, the computer will need to pull more info off the hard disk, without being able to pull it from the Flash memory. This just means you lose the advantage of Flash memory, and so it becomes more and more like it doesn't have any. I doubt whether it would kill the computer, just means it takes 20 seconds to boot, instead of 5.
Oh, and I am reasonably sure that Flash Memory is more like non-volatile RAM than HDD. I think everything on the flash module is on the HDD too, so it's not that big a deal if it dies.
Of course, there's always the possibility that Robson Flash memory will be replaceable, should it fail.