Does it bother anyone that "frightenly ambitious" begins with search and email? Seriously? This is the pinnacle of our contribution to mankind - building search engines and to-do lists? Where's the lunar base? The flying car? The personal robot? The cyborg? Meh, maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. (To be fair I did like the other ones).
What about this? "In the developing world, 24,000 children under the age of five die every day from preventable causes like diarrhea contracted from unclean water." - UNICEF That's 54 jumbo jets a day. I also remain unimpressed by the ambition of his list. And by yours.
One of the core problems the world faces going forwards is resource supply - water, food, fuel. It's long been predicted that the next large-scale war will be over water supplies; there are already a number of simmering conflicts that go back to access to water.
Why are we running out of resources? Significantly, because there's too many people for the resources we have.
Why do we have too many people? Explosive population growth over the past 100-150 years, particularly in the last 50. World population has gone up nearly 50% in 25 years.
What's historically been the best way of arresting population growth? War; kill lots of people. Hmm, not really an acceptable plan. What's the next best? Education, in particular female education.
Now, at its core I agree with your point that the list was under-ambitious. Well, let's refine that - only parochially ambitious. So let's go big. We want a sustainable, long-term end to hunger and world peace.
What do we do for that? Give a man to fish - teach a man to fish. Food parcels and free medicine are a sticking plaster - necessary in the short-term, insufficient in the long-term. Fair trade helps but alone is improving their position at the bottom of the supply chain. Get improved education and access to knowledge though and we enable a long-term culture shift that both better equips the presently impoverished for the future and attacks the root causes of the resource instability that currently so impoverish them.
Which is where projects like OLPC and the Indian tablets are so important, and where (if done properly), the startup idea to replace universities is the biggest and most important on the list. Take it all the way and it's not about knocking down Yale and Harvard; it's about world peace and an end to famine.