Most of your criticism is however about the way these new RTs are presented—with the icon of the original tweeter rather than the person who RT’d them. This is solely an interface design issue, as far as I can see—there is nothing whatsoever to stop another client application from instead prominently displaying the avatar(s) of those people you follow who have RT’d it, with only a smaller avatar say of the original tweeter. That way, it becomes essentially like the current RT except you could have an (potentially optional) avatar of the original tweeter. In this scenario, the only thing that has been lost is the ability to add commentary to your RT. IMHO, it would have been much better if the new RT functionality allowed an easy explicit link between RT and commentary. This could immediately be done in a subsequent tweet which the client app could tie to the original one in your interface, probably through an “in reply to” type link (may require be able to use the existing “in reply to” functionality in the Twitter API).

I have Twitter set to change my Facebook status so I can RT cool/helpful articles for my Facebook community to see that don’t necessarily follow the same people I do on Twitter. The ReTweet button doesn’t update your Facebook status.

I still do it the old fashioned way: RT baby :)