Execution is absolutely more important than vision because everyone can be a visionary if he has even a little interest. For example, when you look at Google giving you search results in one fashion, you think "I wish they had a good design." But only bing.com could prove that search can be better organized and designed, and I 'd say they have executed just fine. Ideas can be generated even in the bathroom.
Assuming I have protein strains data for Alzheimer’s patients along with their ancestors data and assuming I know the protein which if in excess causes this disease, I can attempt to find out what can be a possible cause of this disease. Supercomputer will be really helpful to these kind of pattern matching searches and run protein visualization tools.
I think it is not the beautifulness of the UI that could be distracting. Its the navigation and easily understandable UI. If the user has to click more than 3 clicks to do anything on any UI, user's not gonna stay longer. Example of Google was pretty good. Even now when Google has so many products like Books, Gmail. News etc, users don't get confused as to how to use anything new on Google and that's because of Google's attitude of lesser clicks I suppose. So some website with less clicks, great functionality and a beautiful UI is gonna sell like anything.....