My primary worry is that at some point, the hardware will die.

And by crowdfunding I meant crowdfunding of manufacturing; the hardware would be open source, ensuring you could (with enough skills or good enough friends) make your own instead of buying one, and the software ecosystem would be compatible with it.

I guess my inkling is the opposite. It's like video games, even if the hardware dies, you want the software to be able to run, then you can figure out what hardware you can acquire.

A good example of this is the raspberry pi's with all the NES/SNES/etc games. Withing needing to make sure cartridges and old NES's still work, we use a new piece of hardware to give a very similar experience.

Smart watches and other small worn devices will be changing a lot. I'd rather have hw builds posted to something like massdrop as they are iterated, once the software is mostly saved.

I'm not understanding the downvotes. Pebble devices, as well built as they are, are using components that have definite lifetimes. They are not designed to last forever or be fully user serviceable. What do you do when the components fail?

Components having definite lifetimes and planned obsolescence are two different things, the latter implying artificially limiting the useful life of a product. If that's what you meant, others may be down-voting you because they don't think Pebble in fact did that, especially as you haven't provided any evidence to that effect.