The lousy Republican picks on SCOTUS all came about by appointing (a) judges with a conservative track-record (Kennedy for example) or (b) judges recommended by a "vetting process" (Souter and O'Connor, for example). And let's not forget that it was the (on the whole, rightly) sainted Ronald Reagan who appointed a woman he didn't know very well to the Court so that he could say that he appointed the first woman.
What Bush has concluded from this is obvious. He believes that the most important qualification of a justice is not intellectual accomplishments or a long track-record: it's character. So he has appointed someone whose character he knows very well, through years of working together, and in whom he has confidence. The claim that we don't know that she is a strict constructionist is just wrong: her best friend is the most conservative justice on the Texas State Supreme Court, the Lone Star Scalia, and he has said flatly that she believes in reading the Constitution the way evangelicals read the Bible: straight and literally.
So we have a smart woman, a very talented lawyer, of strong character, who comes to the court with originalist beliefs, and one whom the President knows extremely well. It's surely a better recipe for a conservative justice than listening to Warren Rudman; it may be a better recipe than listening to Ann Coulter or Bill Kristol.
I agree with you that constitutional law is not nuclear physics and isn't meant to be. Unless you're a liberal, the principles of interpretation are essentially straightforward. The only thing she lacks is familiarity with the detailed history of constitutional jurisprudence, but you know what? A Supreme Court Justice hasn't got much else to do besides study that history, and she will have four smart clerks to help her do it. I can't see any reason why she wouldn't be writing exemplary and memorable opinions very soon.
She will be confirmed unless conservative Republican Senators and pundits decide that this is the time to destroy a Republican president just for the hell of it.
I think that part of the problem is that we have a generation of younger conservative pundits who are children of the Clinton era. They were formed in the Maureen Dowd school of political journalism and still tend to think that the point of politics is to score clever points on the other side. They've all been saying for five years that it's a matter of constitutional principle that the President should get the benefit of the doubt when he appoints judges. If they refuse to give Bush the benefit of the doubt here, then they are a crowd of grandstanding hypocrites. To play these games in wartime is inexcusable.