Yes, the name does matter. A lot of people make the mistake of choosing a name without first figuring out what keyword they are targeting. Domain names need to contain the targeted keyword for the site. If you are selling blue widgets, a domain name like buybluewidgets.com is ideal. Don't give it fanciful names. It does not help you at all when ranking in the serps. Google, Yahoo and all search engines look for the targeted keywords in the domain name. It carries a lot of weight. But other factors like the domain age also matters. Older ones get more search engine love.
Yeah! sure.... because it is going to be your brand and each business should has their own brand. If you're building a government site, better you use real name of an organisation as the domain. however, if the site is non-government site, use an ttractive name as the domain to brand it!
If you look the name like google, flickr, reddit, hi5, fark, the name hardly matter, it all need good marketing and branding.
if you want to go the easy way of seo, use your keywords in your domain name/ urls But as the previous poster said. Look at google etc. You can get any domain name listed way up in the search engines even if it's not a keyword optimized domain. You'll just have to work your butt of and make sure to get your seo as good as possible. And when you've done that, make it even better. I've had a few non-keyword-domains rank pretty high in google before, so there's no reason why you can't do so as well. greetz, jobic