Since they legally aren't allowed to serve the only market that is interested in their services it's all over for them. The founders are just consuming what remains of their investors' money while waiting for the company to die.
This is definitely not true. Most payment processing services (like PayPal) just piggy-back on credit card processing networks and simply pass on the processing fees to the consumer. Dwolla is working on building their own processing network that will compete directly with any service that uses these credit card processing networks.
Here's a great article to further understand what Dwolla is working towards: http://www.businessinsider.com/this-28-year-old-is-making-sure-credit-cards-wont-exist-in-the-next-few-years-2011-11?op=1
Yes, they definitely are one of bitcoin's main competitors.
Dwolla is not a currency, Dwolla certainly offer no anonymity and Dwolla is not friction-less or nearly as fast in transmitting funds as bitcoin.
I really think they are two completely different animals.
Although it doesn't share any of the advantages that Bitcoin has, Dwolla is the only service I know of that lets you send any amount of money to another person for no more than $0.25. The only type of transfers I can think of that would be cheaper (free) are transfers within the same bank (one BoA customer transferring money to another person who is also a BoA customer).
With PayPal for instance, you can send money to another person within the US for free. Sending to an international user however costs between 0.5% and 2.0%, and they have restrictions on how much you can send.
I guess you could say Dwolla is like a hybrid of PayPal and Bitcoin.