You rock guys just don't get it. What is it with geologists that they have such a hard time with new concepts, such as plate tectonics, and astrobiology. Oh well.
Ok, let me try to put it to you in the simplist of terms. Mars is a water saturated planet. It always has been, and it probably always will be, certainly now that it is nearly frozen solid. In some areas of the crust, the water dominates, and in other parts it has been cooked out by volcanism, simple desiccation and by substitution, decompostion, dehydroxylation, slow evaporation and sublimation, or whatever transport processes are at work here, some yet to be determined. Whatever happened in these massive flows and outbursts in recent times, happened either cyclically or abruptly, the result being massive melting and movement of the more water saturated strata. However, once that ceased everything just freezes into place, and that is what we are observing. If you can't see the action of water on almost everything here short of the most superficial desiccated layer, well, there is simply no hope for you.
This isn't Earth. These aren't spiffy fresh glaciers laid down in 100,000 years from fresh water recently distilled from a vast ocean reservoir, this is a dusty dirty muddy planet dominated by vast volcanic plateues, a formerly huge northern reservoir, and recently formed icecaps and frozen mud glaciers. Everything north and south of 60 degrees is nearly 70 percent water in the top meter of soil.
Now do please tell us, what do you find so freakin hard to understand about abundant water on Mars? This image, in particular, screams 'subsurface ice sheets', and I anxiously await many more interesting and dramatic photos, now that we are zeroing in on the precise locations of some of the more densely water saturated crust. The whole water on Mars thing is snowballing, now that we are getting the real MRO goods, and not just the MGS scale answers. Anybody with a problem with water on Mars now, may as well scream to the world that they're just another crackpot geologist with some bizarre axe to grind. Do you believe in the steady state universe as well?
Take a very large wet muddy water planet (Mars is very large - #8 in the solar system), apply intense volcanism, waning over time, simultaneously turn off the magnetic field and let the atmosphere dissipate, and what you get is water well mixed with the crust, and then concentrated in certain areas according to the evolutionary outcome of the volcanism verses the glaciation - which is Mars as we see it today, frozen solid in the act of melting, covered with a very this layer of cooked out regolith. I expect Ceres to be very similar at the surface, but much more dramatic.
