The robot thing is not inane because it is part of the distributed/federated document editing, and it has media elements attached to it rather than just text. In IRC, you only talk to people for the most part, so bots in IRC are centered around facilitating that purpose. With Wave, you talk, work, and plan with data that can take any form - a much broader scope that allows robots to do much more than just 'user logged in, user logged out'.

The reason why I think it is a strong alternative to project collaboration tools is because of 'see as you type' and its robot capabilities. Yes, it has a nice document model, but that isn't the key feature for me.

But isn't this precisely where computer use is trending? The whole Web 2.0 thing in retrospect was as mass of more mainstream users discovering that interacting with and getting to know others resulted in many cool things. It's been trending that way since we had 300 baud modems dialing in to BBS. Add to that, the discovery that interaction is a lot more fun when it's about something, like pictures, journal writing, software, news...

But we are still at the infancy stages when it comes to collaboration. Things like the "Minority Report" style multi-touch interfaces, Microsoft Table, and Reactable are the direction we should go. We need interfaces that aren't designed for one person to focus all of their input on one machine. We need interfaces that let us focus our attention on communally manipulated digital media and each other with equal ease.

We're in a tech renaissance. Lots of cool stuff is coming out, and they're all doing things in really different ways. It makes perfect sense that the game is constantly changing. It's exciting!