Sorry, but I don’t have any juicy arguments for you. I agree with most of the concerns you raised here. It would be foolish for any startup to build their business in the way you described in the hotel example. In my understanding of the suggestions put forward by those exploring the lean startup methodology, the point is to be lean, not starving.
If you have a repeatable sales model, based on actual customer activity, hell yeah… go for broke. It doesn’t make any sense to just grow a little bit. On the other end of the equation, it doesn’t make much sense to front load your sales and marketing team with a budget of $100million based on assumptions which don’t have customer actions to back it up.
All that to say, I don’t understand the point of leanstartup methodology as being cheap for the sake of being cheap. But rather, not dumping money and resources into aspects of the business which haven’t been verified by actual paying customers.