Plenty of good research... (Score 5)

There's tons of good GUI research being done:

• zoomable UIs (Pad++)
• two-handed user interfaces (e.g. toolglasses and magic lenses)
• smarter desktops(e.g. Apple Data Detectors, LiveDoc, CyberDesk)

The ACM CHI and UIST conferences over the past 10 years are full of good stuff that hasn't made it to production yet. It'd be great to see some of these ideas incorporated into open source projects.