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Agreed, but the point isn't that it's hard to create enough unique content; I got unique content up the yingyang My point is that I'm unable to elaborate on (important) key features of a product - on the product page - just because other products share those features. And that's just stupid

I've come to the same conclusion myself, but I still find it to be a huge drawback. Consider three different cars, all using the same fantastic engine technology; you won't be able to elaborate on the different landing pages because Google find it to be duplicate content. You would have to link to it, and thus leading the customer to another page, with the engine technology as topic. You'll lose focus, risk losing interest and sales and would have to put a lot of work into maintaining a positive and selling experience just because you want to use key engine features in the content on the actual product page.

A plausible workaround is using an IFRAME and/or JavaScript, but that is not a very nice approach. When Google is measuring (ranking) pages they also skew the web in how we design pages, layouts, content, and IMHO the absence of something like rel canonical for content sections is fueling bad approaches in webdesign. (Read it and weep, Matt)

I have three distinct hosting products, each solving three different problems. While these three products have different features in terms of functionality, they are all built on the same platform. Now, in terms of marketing some features of the platform, f.ex. High Availability, is significant to all of the products. How do I go about to include information about this feature on all product pages without getting penalized for duplicate content?

Is there a way to tell Google that parts of the content on the pages for product 1-3 is duplicated with intent, or duplicated from f.ex. a page that explains the technical aspects of the platform?