Android devices being up to date

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Once you've rooted it you can log onto it like any other Linux box (actually you can do that without rooting but you can't really do much).
It's so familiar it's almost an anti-climax after that.
Android apps are developed on a "real" PC where they can also be run in an emulator for testing/debugging (it's a bit sluggish but does the job well enough). Actually they can be debugged while running on the phone too, with the PC calling the shots.
So there's probably not much need to connect a full-sized keyboard to a smartphone because of that.

@HalibutSandwich: I used the PIC microcontrollers from Microchip so I've not really looked at the Arduino.
That board looks interesting though - checking the circuit it seems to be just a "USB to something programmable and more useful" interface so yeah; the Android app would do the grunt work (user interface, WiFi etc) and output stuff via USB to the interface for further processing/activity.
(think I'd probably do it with a PIC controller though! )

The ADK is probably best thought of as the equivalent of a typical Linux toolchain/dev environment - plus "quite a few" bells & whistles - so it would mostly be a case of doing what you'd normally expect to do (ignoring different environment, changed working methods and so on), but with a specific hardware API instead of a more variable PC version.

Not sure how far you can go with this. Running a Terminal Emulator is easy enough. Here's "top" running on my Legend:


You can do some scripting in Python, Ruby, javascript etc using SL4A: http://code.google.com/p/android-scripting/
And I found this project to add PHP support to SL4A but aren't sure how well it works: http://phpforandroid.net/