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1. In my understanding: it flows link equity back to john.long.com if it is a copy of /home.
2. It's not as simple as that. Try not to compare a canonical to a 301. rel canonical tells SE's that there is a copy of the page somewhere else. So putting a rel canonical on the kids toys to the washing machines will do nothing for your rankings. They are not copies of eachother.
I think, as Barry says, you'll see more improvement in what your visitors do on your site, then what Google brings you. Don't mix up cause and effect. I think because your visitors stay longer, Google will see that. And reward you accordingly.
The numbers don't say a lot, it's more the actual load time. You'll see that bounce rates and pages per visit will go up. I manage a website where we managed to cut the bounce rate in half. avg visit time up 40%, pages p/visit up 30%. Our visit rate went up by nearly 80%. So that was remarkable. And guess where the visitors came from: Google.
It's not only about sheer numbers. If you get a link from bbc.co.uk, theguardian, etc. etc. Those links are only from 2 root domains/C blocks, but will be very trustworthy/authoritive. So you have to look a bit further than just the numbers.
Followed links are of course giving more link juice than no-followed links (which give almost none or no link juice at all)
I would suggest not excluding the / in the robots.txt.
First you redirect the / to home.aspx but then you tell SE's to exclude the home page which you are redirecting anyway. Makes no sense to me, so I would remove it in the robots.txt. No use anyway, because the url is being redirected.
I wouldn't use the 301 redirect to home.aspx. Why not make some (technical?) modifications so that the home page is available on the root of the domain? It's much more beneficial to you site's SEO. Or the other way around, redirect home.aspx to /. Because way more ppl will be linking to the root and not the home.aspx page.
Ah. Yes. Delete the tag.
It's not giving the right signals if it is saying that the page you are currently on is a copy of the page you are currently on.
It's not meant to be used site wide.
Bing has an interesting article about it.
Search enigines wont even reach the rel canical tag, because they'll be redirected before anything else loads from the www version.
Just make sure you do link building to the non www version.
Totally agree with Simon. If you just want to have the domain, to "have". Don't bother.
(Search volume (exact/phrase match)cpcX) + competitiveness in that market + what the mad man wants to pay for it 
Where X would be the earning back period. How long does your client want to pay for the domain before earning it back?
Paste snippets of the new content in Google's search box with " " in between and see if you get any matching content?
I would say, Yes.
In my opinion, but I don't think there has been any concise research about this, a canonical is similar to a 301 redirect. A 301 redirect passes a lot of link juice to the page it is redirecting to, but not all. So I would say yes, this is hurting your SEO because you're not keeping all the juice you could keep when not using the rel = canonical. (or a redirect for that matter)
Just read that they do not support HTTPS/SSL at this time 
So I guess you have to wait for that feature. (Which has been announced months and months ago, but I dont think it's comming anytime soon)
Edit: I must take that back. That only involves linkscape. It should work for the crawling of the pages. I'd wait another week. If nothing happens, contact the helpdesk.
A big player in the clothing retail in The Netherlands (where I live) is using it succesfuly. Look at this query and their results:
http://www.google.nl/search?q=zalando
Use it wisely. I agree with Alan that it can look spammy. So use a meta description viewer so you can immediatly judge if wat you made looks OK in the SE's. It definitely draws in my attention.
<configuration><location path="index.php"></location></configuration>
Did you add the configuration part?
Is your home page available on the / part of your domain? Or is it only accessible via index.php? What CMS are you using?
I would suggest linking to a page that is relevant to the landing page you are creating. Your home page is usually receiving more than enough links from various sources. The underlying pages are often the problem. So try linking to a page that is relevant to the top 10 you created and is in a competitive space.
These are really Wordpress basics Atul
Might be a good idea for you to read some articles on wordpress.org about this.
You can find the wp-config.php file in the root folder of your domain. Where all the wordpress files are located and where all the folders are located like /themes /plugins. That's the root.
Making a .htaccess file isn't hard. It's just a txtfile which has been saved as a .htaccess file without an extension.
Just add the following code, where example.com is your domain
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
There isn't one by default. You can create one by uploading it to the root of your directory. So where the wp-config.php file and the rest is located.
You are correct.
File a bug report for this.
So if you have too long title tags because of this, don't bother changing it because SE's won't cut the title off.
So now it's: www.infoaboutbooking.com and www.bookingengine.com ?
and you want: bookingengine.infoaboutbooking.com ?
The only real argument I can think of is speed. That booking engine has to be very very fast. So it needs his own server. (Free from the webserver that hosts the main domain) Usually something that is hosted on another server is hosted on another domain or subdomain (although you can host 1 domain on multiple servers...)
Using a subdomain vs a different domain then the main domain is a non-discussion. Because in SE's eye's they are both different websites. So it doesn't really matter. Especially because there isn't any content on the booking engine website. (I assume) It's just booking. So think only about your users. Make it very fast and very userfriendly and let the tecchies figure out how to measure stuff between the (sub)domains. (conversion, turnover, etc.)