I also thought it was 100,000, so that's one per hour for 11 years or so... should be enough for anyone. I guess if we are designing things that need lots of writes to non-volatile memory we should consider writing to a flash card.
10,000 writes to the main flash is a worry though, the number of times I do it 
But I guess a few hundred is what it takes to get a project up and running, 10,000 should last a while. Arduino's are hardly expensive so I wouldn't mind buying one every now and again for on-the-go projects. In an economic sense I don't want them to last forever either - no-one would build new ones for me to buy and keep it all going!
I'm also interested in more data writes and reads - is there an easy chip extension that can do this, a standalone eeprom chip that's easy to wire up and burn from the main arduino?