Regarding point 2: Last time I checked (IIRC 2006-ish), there seemed to be common resentiment among scientists working in the area of programming language implementation that there is just too little ILP for successful wide-spread VLIW adoption (modulo some special use cases.)
AFAI(K|R), Hennesy and Patterson's cannonical text (CA-AQA [1]) reflects this: going from 3rd to 4th edition, we find a new chapter "Limits on ILP", VLIW/EPIC elements have been moved from the main contents to the CD-ROM, too (which probably is not a good indicator, though: the 3rd edition was just too heavy to carry it around a lot ;)
There is plenty of ILP for VLIW in many real-world cases -- but the most common case is that where all the instructions in the VLIW are identical. This of course reduces to SIMD, which makes the VLIW unnecessary.
AFAI(K|R), Hennesy and Patterson's cannonical text (CA-AQA [1]) reflects this: going from 3rd to 4th edition, we find a new chapter "Limits on ILP", VLIW/EPIC elements have been moved from the main contents to the CD-ROM, too (which probably is not a good indicator, though: the 3rd edition was just too heavy to carry it around a lot ;)
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Architecture-Quantitative-App...