Been keeping my eye on the Kindle Fire for a while and while it seems Amazon initial software needs some optimization I'm really looking forward to seeing people get Ice Cream Sandwich running on it.  It seems it's only a matter of time. 

Anyone else looking forward to this?  They are already working on getting other Android OSs like Gingerbread/ Honeycomb working.  With ICS coming out recently and given the Kindle Fire has solid hardware I'm very curious to see what it can do with an OS like ICS.

I don't know. So far, I haven't been impressed by most Android tablets. I'm not super-impressed by the Kindle Fire, but it is reasonably good, and solidly usable- and, honestly, "usable" is above what I've come to expect from most Android tablets.

But it's not the hardware that does it. The Kindle Fire is shockingly inexpensive; distinct compromises have been made on the hardware side of things to support that. It's sufficient, but not mindblowing, and I think that's what will show up from the alternate OSes that will soon come to be: they won't do better than mediocre, while Amazon has every incentive in the world to tune their build to be far, far better than mediocre- but they have no incentive to make their build anything other than locked down.

So it becomes a strange sort of competition in the space of the device itself. Amazon keeps selling their device, but then is fighting to keep the best OS, because that keeps people in their marketplace instead of Google's. I have no idea how it'll play out. I know Google can't be happy if the most popular Android tablet turns out to be one that avoids Google's market entirely...

They already have it rooted and running Google's market.  Also you can sideload most any google market app as well.   To do that you only have to change an option.

Given how quickly they've gotten some of this working, I'm thinking if the hardware is able to run it (seems Ram would likely be the limiting factor) I'm thinking the hackers out there will get it working quite well. It seems they are getting close to recovery options and given ICS does away with hardware buttons, they will likely put all their time into getting that working. I find the new ICS software pretty awesome. Apparently some actually have it running on the HTC Incredible (laggy but that phone has a single core CPU) with 512 MB of RAM (same as Kindle Fire).

I'll agree that the hardware will be the limiting factor, but that inexpensive price I think is will what make people put the time in. Why would I bother hacking some device that costs $500 when I can get a very similar (hardware wise) device for $199 and hack it.  I mean sure the no mic and camera are limiting but it's pretty crazy to see what people are already doing and it's been out for less than 2 weeks.