I think this story line probably brought some new readers... if anything to learn more about the AI's. I actually read QC from beginning to end a week ago, and speculated what could happen to "May"
It may have indeed, although personally I think it was just chance for myself. I followed a link from someone's comment on a different comic a couple weeks ago to find this one and read up through. Only found the forums last week and lurked a bit.
I read it on an iPad and the click-to-go-forward navigation is troublesome on it. Several people retweeted comics from this story arc, so I'm certain it attracted some new readers.
What Momo suggested was ejecting the storage medium prematurely (so the hibernate image is no longer present) and destroying it. Therefor "May" would either be stuck permanently as the companion AI until another storage medium becomes available, or until "set free" and having to find a platform that "May" can afford.
I agree with everything you say (and in fact, I think you conveyed the idea loads better than I ever could), but I think there is also a third possibility, here. More than likely, May's output is merely being streamed to Dale's glasses, and likewise anything that happens (input) is being streamed back to her. Thus, ejecting the HD would cut her off completely and ultimately result in death if destroyed (assuming the Robot Jail doesn't keep automated backups... which I'm sure they probably do).
The reason I suspect her "consciousness" is merely being streamed to Dale is because if she were actually uploaded to the glasses, it would be a security risk of her being able to find a way to download back off and onto something else. Also, these two strips:
http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2499
http://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=2500
The impression I got from these two strips is that she was merely "cut off" from Dale, not actually shutdown or anything.
I avoided going there because we don't know much about the glasses. From what is indicated in the comic, the glasses are not even a computer, just a terminal or thin-client. Dale turning off the glasses simply disconnects from the server, the session remains running.
Going back to my comments earlier, a VM or Hibernate image, yes implies that the AI runs entirely from RAM. This is the assumption that the AI itself is not part of a conventional operating system that has "files" in the same context that Windows/Linux does. A comparison is playing a game that doesn't let you rewind/reload, and prevents you from save-scumming. AI's likely evolve in the same manner, where you can't simply "roll back" a personality quirk, otherwise there would be no need for robot-jail, bad AI's could simply be rolled back before they became criminals. In humans, changes happen to our DNA and are propagated to cells and even offspring. This may eventually lead to AI's or Humans that are too "damaged" to function.
Also remember earlier when Pintsize was upgraded to a new chasis, and when he had additional RAM installed. In the former, no changes to Pintsize's personalty changed, while upgrading the RAM did. Though I speculate this just makes an AI able to keep more thoughts in active memory instead of paging out.
Momo's threat to destroy May's storage medium may simply show the same kind of sass that Faye does to other Human characters. Only we don't see it that way. If it actually happened, the OS would likely just say the physical storage medium has been unmounted and would continue to operate and queue writes until it comes back. In a conventional computer this would eventually force the OS to either throw away writes or pause/halt until the drive comes back.
(I'm speaking from experience, as on FreeBSD, if the drive runs out of space, it will continue to run until it consumes the swap file, and then any process with a write pending will be halted until space is available. Windows is a lot less friendly about it.)
At any rate I'm interested to see the fallout from Momo and May interfering with Dale.