Olympus also makes some cameras that have features like this. The Olympus are solid, but lack image quality. Hopefully this Sony doesn't have a 15MP image sensor or it will lack image quality as well.
I'm not sure how large the market is for this type of camera, but there are a lot of people who need a camera like this. I have sold people several cameras for ~$100, and the person comes back several months later because it was dropped too many times. If a person would just spend $300 from the start, he/she would only need one camera instead of three.