Reliable speech recognition and artificial intelligence would go a long way toward making interfaces more usable. How many times I have to move around looking for files and opening them with the correct app when I wish I could just say "edit the web.xml file in my garbanzo web app folder". Or "Restart Apache."
Why am I ever looking at XML files anyway? These things are meant to be read only by parsers.

This kind of stuff is so tedious especially if you have RSI. It mystifies me to see that so many people are returning to essentially a 1970s operating system (Linux) or Unix on the Mac. Now they can issue commands like ls -l to see all their files or cat xxx to look at a file in a terminal window. grep , awk , sed. This is for hackers and only hackers. The fact that these things still exist is not a testament to their power. No one has broken out of the box. I don't think MS Vista is a move forward but it sounds like they at least they entertain some of these ideas. Unfortunately, they seem to be taken with the idea that you can walk into your house and have your computer figure out what song to blast from your entertainment center. That much I can handle. But give me a computer that I can ask "Whats 34.48 times 94?"