Well, yes, there are lots of deals and largely thanks to Betamax, it is a
major pain to try to work out which one to go for. Then there are all sorts
of cheap deals on landline calls too, making any savings via VoIP fairly
minimal.
And most of us have mobile contract deal too.

In my own (fairly special) case, (I don't have a landline :-) I gave up on
Betamax etc. and just stick with
sipgate.co.uk.
It gives me rental free UK geo. landline No., I use it for 0800 calls,
infrequent foreign calls, and of course free calls to other VoIP users.
It works just fine ( I have QoS VoIP router ) and I pay very little (just
for the foreign calls).

It easily covers 'Homeworker's' first 5 points.
6. can have multiple sipgate Nos, but needs hardware (e.g. suitable router)
to ring one phone.
7. can be done with some hardware, or asterix.
8. no one can do that at present

Regards,
Martin