My first thoughts too. If you go to the dev site (http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Android+Support), however, you'll see that Android support is actually one of their core issues (well, it's under the 'core' list) right now.
Not excusing the editor/writer of the article for anything; that was a low trick to get readers.
Rich Hickey: "It's like traditional databases in being consistent and transactional, and it's like these new databases in being oriented toward flexibility for the application developer. It's bridging those two worlds."
Doesn't the CAP theorem [1] say that consistency, availability and partition tolerance cannot be achieved in a single system? How is Datomic giving us consistency, transactions and scalability? What are they sacrificing? How are they getting the 'best of all worlds'?
In addition to what jamii said, you can also have multiple write servers (called "transactors) and can join data between them. Furthermore, that transactor isn't serving queries, so it can have higher write throughput than a traditional database.
Assuming hot failover, it's a perfectly reasonable approach for pretty much all places a traditional SQL database was reasonable before.
Not really. All the writes go through a single server (which can have a hot failover). If you can't talk to that server then you can't write.
In theory it should still be able to handle at least the same write load as a traditional db whilst offering more flexible modelling and distributed queries.