Well put, can't really add much to this!
It's also good to remember the theme, Virtual Pet, is really easy to keep a small scope on, and you definitely should. If you try to plan for making a very simple virtual pet with all the basic features, get that working, then in the remaining time you can start trying to just tack on features. Like PhilBlank said, it's more like a tech demo, so if you're hacking things together at the end, as long as it works, there's no shame!