I sure as hell didn't think limiting people to 140 characters was going to make sense.

I believe that was originally a technical limitation, and only later did it become evident that there is a business value in offering partially-literate individuals a medium that caters to, while providing plausible deniability for, their slow reading and writing speeds.

Twitter has little or no technical reason to be so limited, of course, but doesn't want to alienate the tldr crowd.

Technical limitation: SMS are 160 characters. 20 chars for username and 140 chars for message.

So does running a successful bagel shop. The "ideas are worthless" people place your neighborhood bagel shop, Crazy Frog ringtones, and Qualcomm in the same group: businesses you can totally run as long as you know how to 'hustle.' Somehow I think Andrew Viterbi would frown on that.