There's no reason why an ideal body needs to have such a high center of gravity though? Clearly we are wasting a lot of energy and capacity to maintain that balance.
I am pretty the ideal body is actually a spider.
Something vaguely centauroid is probably would be the most middle of the road design: easy to maintain steady balance with 4 legs without taking too much of the floor space, the central column on top of it can go quite high up and easily have up to 4 hand-like manipulators attached to it with wide range of motion.
