Title, abstract, and text beginning on same page

If you want to have it look like an article, you should use an article. Like this, no hacking is needed. The command \chapter does not exist, but \section will give a title like "1 Chapter" anyway. If you want to get a report feeling for the next chapters (sections), you can just add a \clearpage behind your first chapter.

In your collection, you just have to replace all \subsection by \subsubsection, all \section by \subsection and finally all \chapter by \section. And then change the documentclass to article.

Looks like this:

% arara: pdflatex

\documentclass{article}
\author{author}
\date{\today}
\title{title}

\begin{document}
\maketitle
\begin{abstract}
    abstract-text
\end{abstract}
\section{First bit}
If you want to ramp your text straight onto the title page, start the text at 
something that does not cause a page break, like a section.  Here's a handy 
place to introduce some of your woofy conventions, like quotes in equations.
\newpage
\section{New Page}
A new chapter starts a new page.
\end{document}

It seems that use of titling http://www.ctan.org/pkg/titling is a way to do it

Code

\documentclass[notitlepage]{report}
\usepackage[left=1in, right=1in, top=1in, bottom=1in]{geometry}

\usepackage{titling}
\usepackage{lipsum}

\pretitle{\begin{center}\Huge\bfseries}
\posttitle{\par\end{center}\vskip 0.5em}
\preauthor{\begin{center}\Large\ttfamily}
\postauthor{\end{center}}
\predate{\par\large\centering}
\postdate{\par}

\title{TITLE}
\author{NAME and ID}
\date{\today}
\begin{document}

\maketitle
\thispagestyle{empty}

\begin{abstract}
\lipsum[1]
\end{abstract}

\section*{First bit}
If you want to ramp your text straight onto the title page, start the text at 
something that does not cause a page break, like a section.  Here's a handy 
place to introduce some of your woofy conventions, like quotes in equations.
\chapter{New Page}
A new chapter starts a new page.  
\end{document}