Canon EOS 60D DSLR

Corrections

The body is high strength engineering plastic, and the camera still has a steel chassis. It is of course not as durable as the magnesium body of the 50D but it is far from "flimsy".

Canon hasn't put a CCD in a DSLR since mid 2004. That "CCD [sic] out of the entry level 550D" is also used in the decidedly higher level 7D.

I'd have waited until after the 60D was available so the price on the 50D could drop before I bought it, but that's just me.

Full-frame

Well if you consider the 5D a consumer camera, then Canon already does.

However if you think about it, a 35mm full-frame sensor uses practically 2.5x the silicon of an APS-C like the D60 (864mm² vs 343mm²) That significantly increases the cost of the sensor (more silicon, plus lower yeald). The mirror also has to be bigger and the viewfinder prism too; again all costing more.

Then you need full-frame lenses. All the film lenses were full-frame of course, but now there is a huge range of cheap as chips lenses for smaller sensors; they need less glass and the angles to the sensor are reduced, making it much cheaper to produce the lenses inside the lens.

So to answer your question; there will be consumer cameras with full-frame sensors when the consumers are happy to pay full-frame prices.

Pentax

As a long-time Pentax owner, including owning a lot of Pentax mount top quality glass, I was very very disapointed that they took soooo long to come out with a DSLR worth having. So much so I sold everything and switched to Canon (now it seems like a shame, but because of that I've had a DSLR for a few years).

Pentax used to be top of the heap (including first autofocus SLR), and I still look at their stuff fondly (including the new digital 645 last year). It's a shame that they lost their market share. I'd happily recommend their stuff to people.

The in-body stabilisation sounds like a good idea, but you can't beat in-lens stabilisers. (With my long lenses, it was hard to keep the focus point over something without a tripod, and in-body stabilisers don't help). Also not all stabilisers are equal.

You can buy a simple hot shoe to pc sync adapter for pennies.

Or with an optocoupler to protect against the voltage of the strobes for a few pennies more.

If I were a terrible cynic, I'd suspect you were just trying to bluster up a justification for having bought the 50D at the wrong time. Assuming that's not bluster too.

likely buyer for the same reasons you don't like it.

I also consider myself an abuser of camera bodies, and some of the same points you list as negatives look very much like positives to me, perhaps due to a different use-case. You're probably right that you're NOT the target market for this camera, and Canon want you to buy the 7D instead, but I still think think some of your objections are spurious.

Body strength: If you truly drop your camera often enough that you're worried about breaking the body, and you take yourself even half seriously as a photographer, your budget for replacing damaged lenses must be phenomenal...

Swivel screen: may be an insta-break if you're into dropping your camera, or grabbing it by whatever protrusion is nearest, but if you think a swivel screen is such a bad idea, you don't have to use it that way - it's very unlikely to break when it's folded in!

From my POV (pun intended) a swivel screen would be an incredible boon for composition in difficult spaces, and the option to have it LCD-inwards protects the LCD from scratches the rest of the time when composing through the viewfinder.

And while I can see that many photographers couldn't care less about a little extra weight or bulk, to me a lighter (and smaller) body means I can take it places where taking another camera increases personal risk or at the very least discomfort; down canyons, up mountains and rock climbs, travelling out of the way places. Steel chassis/plastic body construction is plenty strong enough for me, and I've been shooting outdoor activities since before the label "extreme" was applied to anything and everything, back when camera religion was as much KR64 vs Velvia as Nikon vs Canon. The only reason I use an entry-level body is size and weight, this being equal I would have bought a high-level prosumer camera years ago.