WPF and Rich Internet Applications

I finally decided to install .NET 3.0 so I could play around with some XBAP demos. They're interesting (for example, from the New York Times). It still seems like the primary value of "RIA" applications is (a) ease of deployment, and (b) state transitions, i.e. animations (note: WPF required link).

Whether its Flash, AJAX, WPF, OS X, etc. - haven't really seen any new interaction paradigms (that aren't fun, but useless) - it just looks prettier; you could have presented the same utility with the original Mac OS user interface, more or less. That's not the case with the transition from DOS/command line apps to GUIs.

Heck look at the Firefox 2.0 UI...

That's not a bad thing or anything, but a little surprising I guess - its been more than 20 years (at least 15, if you want to give it a few years). Evolution, not revolution...

Updated: Reminder - some "older tech" examples of richness (in Flash, DHTML, Java); some adding value - some not so much :) ... And speaking of useless but fun - here's a image/photo "sand" simulation in plain old C code :)