Actually, I believe it was discovered a while ago that if you have more than 8 icons in the status bar, they just start vanishing. It doesn't keep moving over.

Nevertheless, that IS "reserved" space. More or less because it was probably easier to program that way then to make the reserved space fill up JUST the left side.

Plus, keep in mind, when you're in widget/shortcut adjusting more, the bar covers the entire top. So you just know some fool would move a shorter-than-the-height-of-the-bar widget up there, and then get annoyed when he couldn't delete it. Then he'd ***** at Nokia, etc.

I get that it's not perfect, but it's better than dealing with *****ing like that every few days on the forums.

I'm sure it's possible to hack hildon desktop and make it let you move widgets up there... But I don't think it's really an ideal way to do it.