Does anyone have anything on this?

Basically, the answer is DON'T. I've seen people get into all kinds of problems
just by renaming the Title field, much less changing its datatype. This is a
system field  that SharePoint depends on. Changing it will have unanticipated
side effects.

I don't think that any column's type can be changed  once it is created. You
have to delete and add a new one (which, as you've already discovered, can't
be done with the Title column). You can move the Description to the top
though, and modify the views to not display the Title column.

A slight problem remains, however. The Title column still shows up when
creating a new item. I haven't figured out how to change  the displayed
fields on the ListForm yet. Perhaps one of the list  gurus knows the answer
to this?

As a workaround, you could move the Title field  to the bottom of the form,
and include a default value such as "n/a" or something to that effect. Not
very elegant, I know, but I think that your users would soon get the idea.

OK, that notion lasted about 30 seconds. You CAN change  the type for columns
other than Title.

For some reason, I thought that this was disallowed as you would lose data.
Actually, SharePoint just warns you, but lets you lose the data if you
choose.