people often cite patents as the reason for this (lack of multi-touch) but I don't think it's the real reason. For starters almost everyone else is using multi-touch, and from what I understand (I haven't any dev experience with Android) multi-touch support is built into the OS, just that the default apps don't use it
This is true. Dolphin Broswer on the Android opperating system supports multi-touch. Gives you the pinch zoom so covetted on the iPhone. It is just going to take time for the applications to catch up to where Android 2.0 is.