It's highly dependent on what area of Detroit you're in. There are some parts of Detroit that are as the media portrays them: high crime/murder rate, abandoned buildings, and generally unpleasant areas. Additionally, the city government has had lots of issues with corruption. Currently the former mayor is being prosecuted by the FBI on a variety of charges. There's lots of problems that snowball into a not so nice living situation.
I'm an American and I've never understood this either. It's been around since the start of our democratic process, but these days it just seems like a counterproductive tactic.
I think the integration of G+ in the core of Android will do wonders for its adoption. Suddenly the millions of users with Android devices have an incentive to begin using G+.
Normally Android apps (the 'properly' written ones) use the same code base across tablets and phones. Most of the layout is done as xml, with different xml files loaded based on the size of the screen, resolution, etc.
That being said I checked out the Google+ app on my Xoom and it does not appear that they included proper tablet configurations yet.
I'll do my best to answer your questions, as my girlfriend was the lucky recipient of a CR-48.
1) I don't have a whole lot of experience with this as we were pretty much on wifi the whole time. I do know you have to manually enable 3g in the settings though. Once 3g on I assume it's automatic when there's not wifi around.
2) Unfortunately I don't have a whole lot of experience with this one either. The only pictures we every took with it were the initial user pictures, which didn't turn out all that well (although the newer chromebooks may have better cameras). I would assume you would be able to take pictures through any site that cam make use of a webcam though.
3) Battery life was pretty excellent. My girlfriend would use it all day at school for notes. It pretty much goes into hibernate when the lid is closed.
4) This is the part about the review that confuses me. The CR-48 we had always updated silently. It would update in the background, and then when the laptop was restarted it would install. I don't think I ever saw it prompt for an update.
5) First off, there are no native apps. It's literally chromium on a minimal linux build. The maps 'app' that he would have to use is the full blown maps.google.com. As long as he had a 3G connection I would think he'd be fine, otherwise I'm not too sure how much caching the web version of maps does.
I hope this helps. Sorry I wasn't able to provide more info about some of your questions