Nomen: that pretty much has been resolved thanks to smart load balancing where it cycles through the various sectors to write to. Even in you continuously write data all day long, it't still going to take >5 years before you hit the max. Even then: the economical lifespan of a drive tends to be less than 5 years (most people upgrade to a faster/larger drive by then) plus people don't actually write to disk 100% of the time, so the actual life is longer.
That said, over the last few years I've lost more thumbdrives that become entirely unreadable than harddrives, so I'm not putting too much stock in the reliability of a flash drive just yet.
(I also noticed that Dell started shipping 32GB solid state drives across a bunch of their laptops, for a few hundred dollars more than a 'normal' harddrive. As far as prices are concerned, they are starting to get almost appealing now.
That said, over the last few years I've lost more thumbdrives that become entirely unreadable than harddrives, so I'm not putting too much stock in the reliability of a flash drive just yet.
(I also noticed that Dell started shipping 32GB solid state drives across a bunch of their laptops, for a few hundred dollars more than a 'normal' harddrive. As far as prices are concerned, they are starting to get almost appealing now.