I just recently bought the anarchist's design book and toolbox book! I'm just just getting into though - haven't built anything yet. Need to get tools and set up a shop.
And thus the reasons to keep trying to improve those stories. Offline is import for applications. Many web applications make perfect sense to also work offline, and if that can be done easily, then what's the argument? I'd agree that looking like a native app by matching look and feel is probably not a great plan, but I also just fundamentally don't understand the attitude of saying that the web should be relegated to blogs/news/wikipedia style pages and leave everything else to native app silos.
Audio-only chat would be nice - we use skype, and audio only is our default. If there was a way to make the notes area be a code editor, or have two tabs - one for notes, one for code, that would be really nice. We use google docs a lot, but its terrible for code, so sometimes we use collabedit. Finally, it would be really nice if the notes/todos could integrate with something like an issue tracker or project management tool.
I've tried this out in a meeting with a couple of other people. It worked pretty well! I work remotely and this is definitely shaping into something really great.
Yeah, I believe the slower update cycle too. I have two iPad 1's and an iPad 2, and while I'm definitely due for an upgrade, it doesn't get the same type of price reduction as a phone, so it'll just have to happen in its own time.
As for use - they are constantly getting used for games, movies, books, and web browsing. That is what they are good at. You want a clear use case - its that. My computer stays on the desk most of the time.
I would just point out that the impetus for the Rust language was Mozilla looking for a better language to implement a browser in than C++. They obviously have a lot of experience writing C++ and how to do it as good as possible, but found it coming up short, especially as multi-core starts becoming the bottleneck.