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There's also no scientific evidence to be overly (or even cautiously) pessimistic.
You have to remember that these planet's surface tempts etc, were based on grey-body calculations and are most likely not a true reflection of the actually env' conditions of the planet's themselves.
The only way we're going to be able to know for sure is to physically image these planets and take spectroscopic readings of their atmospheres. That, or actually go there and see for ourselves.
If the comments stick in the minds of the public all well and good. There's more to the politics of science than making headlines. This is just the sort of thing which encourages people to fund the scientific efforts more so than they actually are being done at present. Give people the chance to see what is out there and all the possibilities, and the funding will come eventually.
I would also disagree with Seth's (crude) analysis of 3% of all sun like stars having habitable planets. This result was only from 4 months work, on a patch of sky that only cover 1/400th of the total area of the observable sky and only to a depth of 3000 light years. That's still too statistically small to be of any significance. Might be a different matter once GAIA is launched, but for now it's only promising. What can be said from this is that if the numbers stack up, there are a mind bogglingly large number of planets in our galaxy. Even if only 1 in 100 (or 1 in 1000, 1 in 10^6) of them were habitable, it would still be a huge number of habitable planets present in our galaxy. More than you could count in a lifetime.
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