That's 1000, not 10000 (The limit in the wizard is actually 1080), but I can't imagine anyone really needing more than 360; I just picked some arbitrary high limit that I thought nobody would need to go beyond. It does take some memory to have a lot of states, but not as much memory as it would take to have an actual pre-rendered graphic for each state. Just the memory for the rotation matrix that knows how to transform the graphic to each rotation, and the memory for including each of those frames in a sprite state. I haven't calculated, but surely it's less than an entire graphic would be.
Yes, acceleration and gravity and such will be much more in your control in SGDK2. And the first sprite template I made is a car that accelerates at .1 pixels per frame per frame instead of the 1 ppfpf that version 1.x uses. Changing acceleration wil lbe as simple as selecting the "accelerate" rule in the sprite definition and changing the parameter. By default the parameter is specified in tenths of a pixel per frame per frame, but you could also alter the code to make it hundredths or whatever you like without much difficulty. (Editing code and having it linked to the project will be nicer and easier in SGDK2 as well).