I tried to rewrite the 'preserving data' section introduction, since I think InnoDB does a good job here with page checksums / crash recovery / doublewrite buffer, and is now the default.

Other database systems (Oracle) have the hardware resilience features you are describing, like mirroring, but InnoDB has made an intentional choice not to offer this functionality directly.
My own silly typo
Clarified that utf-8 implimentation is standard (called the bmp) even if it is limited.
The 4 byte version is available, but the fact that it's always a variable charset, but you
have to choose which variable charset makes the argument somewhat true.  This is intentional on
mysql's behalf of course, since we do actually offer fileformat backwards compatibility.
Line wrapping.
Accepted pull request #1 (thanks, @morgo!)

Further elaboration on ASM, encoding issues, corruption checks.