1. Less ugly houses? Who cares. Dirt sticks to the bottom of outcroppings and caves IRL, so it makes perfect sense for it to behave the way it does in MC.
2.The Redstone is iconic, and though it is odd, so are Lightsabers and cars that turn into giant robots. Copper and bronze would be too complex in addition to the fact that bronze is weaker than iron IRL.
3. Flint tools? Really? Find me a hunk of flint big enough and strong enough to mine with and then I'll believe it's a good idea. And besides, I may be weird in saying this but I don't feel like spending my days 'flint farming' instead of mining.
4. Diamond, at least, makes perfect sense as a tool. As for gold armor, lots of armor was made of gold back in the day as a way of showing off. Why should it be different in Minecraft? And besides, there isn't any point in removing tiers.
5. Smelting iron into steel would be awesome, but I think it should take more than just smelting... like two iron becomes one steel, or three becomes two, or perhaps an extra material is needed to help refine. Otherwise iron becomes pointless.
6. Dragons and volcanoes. Good idea, though I would rather have the dragons drop something other than another tool tier.
7&8. I agree with both of these, though volcanoes should be rare.
9&10. Also agree, but more content is already on the way, including NPCs.
11. I feel like trading with NPCs would take away too much from the game. Minecraft has a certain ambiance since you're all by yourself and completely self-dependent.
12. I'm sure this will come eventually, but it isn't really necessary, especially since the community will suddenly become flooded with worthless servers set up by 11 year-olds on windows xp laptops.
13. What else do you need to farm with? One has a hoe, a watering can would be overly complicated and anything else I can think of is just dumb. This is Minecraft, after all, not Farmville or Harvest Moon.
14. Not really needed. There are flowers and plants that can be moved and farmed, and a block of flowers would just look... back in my opinion.
15. Creative mode FTW. This is something I would love to see, though I can understand why he hasn't done it yet.
16. Not a bad idea if you can turn it off like you said in 17. BUT, most people like to build really epic things instead of just surviving, and without a save/load feature besides backing up the file yourself, it would be too annoying and probably almost completely unused. Even if a few people did use it, the effort Notch would have to make to accomplish this wouldn't really be worth it since it wouldn't improve the game much. Again, this is Minecraft not some other game like Defend Your Castle.