Thats very true. The plan was to give the user heavy asynchronous IO functionality that appear to the user as making a simple ajax call with a callback function. Provides the developer asynchronous functionality on the server side. Scope variables and so on are all handled behind the scenes.
Absolutely. Node.js is still interpreted by V8 as far as i know. The runtime libs provided by node.js are all written in JS. However, With this initiative, all the runtime libs will be implemented in c as well.
If the service is exposed publicly to the web, It can be crawled regardless of whatever guards are in place by the service provider. Browser emulation will be a good start.