Douglas,
Your point about the different screen shape probably does explain a few mm of difference, but it does not change the fact that lens mount size and such is irrelevant to the height of the bodies. It is still true that, apart from having the hotshoe and such on top of the EVF instead of beside it, the height of the rest of each body is determined by the height of the LCD plus the height of the EVF. The LCD shape difference is of course due to the format shape difference, not because Olympus chose a different shape in order to "hide" the need fpr extra height elsewhere. The main reason that the Olympus EVF is above the lens mount while Sony's is not is the combination of
- the Olympus LCD id a bit higher, putting the LCD a few mm higher
- the Olympus lens mount is a bit smaller.
By the way, the NEX-7 body design does make a good case that there is no room for body down-sizing from further sensor downsizing: every mm of its height and width is necessitated by features unrelated to sensor size, like thr LCD, EVF, and the controls and handgrip needed to the right of the LCD. I think that even a 35mm sensor could fit in such a body, amd even with a lens mount no larger. In cameras hat have neither optical viewfinder mechanisms nor film spoole, size is all almost all about the lenses!
And never mind what I said was a minor point about rangefinders: I already agreed that there is no "nose" disadvantage for the VF at left compared to VF in the middle. It was more an aside at my suspicion that some other people (Richard Sexton?) consider the true range-finder camera's "rectangular box with VF in the top-left corner" shape to be more natural for "EVIL" cameras on the basis of a spurious association with range-finder cameras, given that EVIL cameras are in reality as "rangefinder-less" as they are "mirror-less" .
Returning to the official topic, "A Critique of Contemporary Camera Design": I sometimes wonder if a design that truly started from scratch, with no relics of the spatial constraints of the film transport mechanism or an OVF, would be radically different -- maybe a design with only an EVF, no screen on the back, could resemble a small hand-held telescope, with controls mostly on top, operated almost like a wind imstrument. (There could be a LCD on the top, for when top-down viewing for composition is more convenient, and it could flip up to vertical position for horizontal viewing.) the vastly different shapes adopted by the earliest all-electronic cameras, meaning video-cameras, is a hint that digital still camera design still has a lot of historical baggage.
My "telescope/recorder camera" would be smaller in two of three dimensions, and fit even better in your bag!