I think Neville was able to get the sword out of the hat because, if you remember in the second movie, Harry was able to take the sword out of the hat before he killed that giant snake at the end. I think the same principle is working here.

1) I think this can reasonably be written off as magic. Just treat it as a hat of summoning and not a hat of storing. That is to say, the sword wasn't in the hat when Harry pulled it out either, the hat just summoned the sword from wherever it was at the time.

2) No. Still doesn't make sense to me.

3) They serve some thematic purpose. Essentially Harry had to choose between taking on Voldemort by becoming really dang powerful or by just weakening Voldemort. By the end it was a choice between conquering death or accepting it. This is not to say they weren't a clunky way of making this choice manifest.

4) I quite agree that Draco never became an interesting character. He didn't half a quarter of the depth of say Snape. Near as I can tell, the lesson is that some evil henchmen aren't hardcore and showing some restraint towards them may pay off either directly (Draco pretending not to recognize people) or through their relations (Draco's mom pretending Harry was dead because she knew Draco lived). On the whole, this seems like a really lame justification for Slytherin house.

5) Basically. I mean there's also the Lily's blood protection thing, but really it's property rights.

6) Well, it could be that he only thought Snape was a cold enough of a guy to pass on the "you've got to sacrifice yourself" message. Mad-Eye probably would have been too, although Mad-Eye died so we'll never know if he also had the message. That said I don't really get the point of Snape's deep cover. He could have done the sword delivery (which I thought was really cool) without being a double agent. His only real purpose seems to have been to confuse Voldy on the nature of the property rights issue. But that seems like a dumb reason to send someone deep cover.

My recollection was that the sword was summoned from Dumbledore's office in an earlier book after Harry was told help will always be given at Hogwarts to those who ask for it. In the last book, the sword was in the possession of a goblin not at Hogwarts. If its power was that great, why didn't they summon the other artifacts with it?

I recall Tolkien was annoyed when asked why the fellowship just didn't fly to Mount Doom on the backs of Giant Eagles. He replied that the Eagles were not a taxi service. Really, Professor, 'cause that's how you've used them in the past.

PD Shaw:

I figure the sword was specifically linked to the hat. They were both old Hogwarts artifacts and presumably could have been linked back when they were created. So there's no reason the hat should have been able to summon the Hallows or such.

Admittedly, this raises the question of why the other Hogwarts artifacts weren't linked. It might just be a case that they weren't considered as useful in the event of an emergency. The diadem gives wisdom which I tend to think is more useful before a battle and I don't even know what the Hufflepuff cup is useful for.

Also, the hat wasn't in their possession during the book. But presumably if it could have been used to retrieve the Diadem someone would have done that a long time ago and it wouldn't have been the lost Diadem.

Good points Greg. A little googling reminds me that the hat and the sword were the only known relicts of Godric Gryffindor. I guess I forgot that because the hat would seem more logically to be something all the founders would have contributed to.

PD Shaw:
Oh the hat was his? I knew it was the school's but didn't realize it specifically belonged to him. That makes even more sense. Good googling.

Now that I know they were both his, I've got to imagine he pulled that trick all of the time. Probably got obnoxious by the third or fourth time he drew a sword out his hat to slice a cake or for a ribbon cutting ceremony or the like.

Did anyone else notice the similarity in the ending of Harry Potter series (which I agree is the weakest book of the series) with the end of Season 1 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy
1) Willingly goes alone to face the Master and her
own impending death (motivated by a desire to save her friends) 2) Is "killed" by the Master
3) Is resurrected, stronger than ever, and defeats the Master.

Mark,
That's certainly an interesting comparison and now that I think about it there are a lot of similarities between that Buffy ending and the Deathly Hallows one. Although Harry does not give the witty one-liners after he comes back quite like Buffy and he is nowhere near as attractive...

When I read DH I couldn't help but compare it to the ending of Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe. I know that Harry doesn't die, but the fact that he is willingly sacrificing himself for his friends and ends up coming back to defeat Voldemort (like Aslan defeated the White Witch) made it impossible to shake the connection between the two endings from my head. I don't think that Rowling intended for Harry to be a Christ-figure like Lewis did with Aslan, but there are certainly similarities. Both authors also seem to have a very warm and fuzzy picture of what death is. I'm assuming that for Lewis this is because of his Christianity and for Rowling it is because she's a children's author and would not want to terrify all the little children with a bleak view of death.

I'd love to hear any other comparisons because it does seem to me that Rowling borrowed ideas from a lot of other sources.