I don't think it's necessary to rule out the square sensor completely. Pareto's comments earlier about the utility of switching between vertical crop and horizontal crop at the touch of a button (or for that matter the full available area of the sensor) would provide somewhat novel and useful functionality. I don't think it is money spent without benefit to the consumer.
Turning the camera of course is not hard, but there would be no need then for a portrait grip, or procedural changes for camera mounted accessories (eg. flash). Also, this raises some interesting possibilities for creative cropping / video crops / digital pans etc. that could be of use in some way that we have not yet imagined (the same way we all thought the nintendo DS would be a silly gimick, or the wii nothing more than name calling).
The fairly banal complaint about lens hoods needing to be redesigned is not I think a deal breaker. Engineers can design a device to record representations of light into nothing more than electronic information... I'm sure a plastic adapter for each lens is not out of their scope of expertise.
The camera is at an interesting price point - as discussed. There must be some reason it is priced in such a way.... maybe the camera is not truly APS-c, but rather APS-c
compatible, with the extras that a square type sensor might offer.