Given that a lot of systems are capable of a gig or more of memory, what about running a flash drive with the distro installed to the flash, and either setting the swap to use a RAM drive, or even running the full distro in a RAM drive? Obviously, this deviates quite a bit from what the thread started as and I'm not suggesting this as a solution to his question. Seems that it could easily solve the problem of repeated writes to the flash.
eric
You could, but the system would usually put swap on the root partition. Since swap is a lot of writes, and many flash-memory drives don't survive large numbers of writes, it is known to destroy the flash-memory drive.
The advantage of the systems that are designed to use flash-memory is that they minimize the writes to flash-memory (usually only on shutdown), thus preserving it. There are a number of systems designed this way, but the most popular are Puppy and DSL (both of which are often used in systems that boot and run entirely from a CF card), but there are some others.