I thought it was weird as well... maybe it's simply to do with the for loop never ending. Does the bootloader only jump in between repeats of the loop() function? Maybe the bootloader never gets called again since the loop() function never finishes. That would explain why I never got to burn a new program on the chip.
Is there any way to stop the running program and give control back to the bootloader? Pressing the reset button on the Arduino didn't do anything like that on my board.
Jonas