I think the issues are a lot more complex than portrayed by simple iPad magazine apps are crap sentiments. The platforms around today (disclaimer, I am the co-founder of one of them, Oomph) do allow designers to do silly things, but conversely, they allow designers to do amazing things that would not previously be possible without low level coding. The results are outstanding, and most customers love them, we certainly get a great deal of positive feedback from the readers of the magazines we help publish. Most of these platforms (well ours does) also use HTML, as well as other features (we have one called text objects) that allow rendering on multiple resolutions with smaller download sizes.
I think The Magazine is awesome on a number of levels, but it also comes from a certain viewpoint, one that most traditional publishers cannot embrace without breaking the way they currently do business. Marco has been able to do build himself a new platform with essentially no constraints (aside from his upfront time & money investment obviously), utilising a new business model, a luxury print publishers may not have. He has also been able to build himself the infrastructure required to complete this, this is not expertise most publishing houses have, and he's publishing in HTML, a lot of publishers don't have the tools or expertise to produce HTML content to the quality they're looking for.
The big opportunity here is for publishers to embrace this new medium wholeheartedly, not with their traditional mags/brands, but with new ones built specifically for digital. In my view, publishers & other "traditional" content owners should be funding skunkworks projects that cannibalise their own market before someone else does (something Apple continues to do for example).
A dual pronged approach where they continue to leverage their existing brands, mags, etc. but branch out into newer markets & business models by repurposeing & utilising their existing content is a win-win scenario.
I've been involved in the Functional Java project for a while, it was created as we worked for a consultancy that did most of its work in Java and we wanted to use functional idioms in Java. It was also intended as a bit of an experiment to see just how much could be done in Java,