Perhaps someone should point out that Matt Mackall is the creator and lead developer of Mercurial (according to wikipedia). I've been using Mercurial for some time but I had no idea who was the author of that email.
What I would like to see is some way to "vote" towards some features. For example, FSEvents support on OSX.
Hopefully Fog Creek is putting some cash towards Mercurial development.
The are plenty of big companies that could stump Mercurial some cash or development time. Mozilla for one uses Mercurial heavily.