The ReacTable project is pretty damn cool. Wow. I'd really like to see it doing something other than synthesized techno. I could imagine this is going to evolve very quickly as other musicians bump into its limitations and say "wouldn't it be cool if I could ..."

As to Microsoft's Surface, it certainly looks pretty, but I'm not convinced that it's going to be as huge as they wish it was. Yeah, it looks fun to drag tunes from my collection onto my iPod, but they don't have the kind of power that you get with a textual interface, making queries and designing smart playlists. Likewise, for pictures, you want full-text search of your metadata, and you want any other possible organization to help you nagivate the thousands of pictures that we all have these days. The last thing I want is to sort through an unordered stack of (digital) picture windows.

Let's say a restaurant has one of these things for ordering and paying. How much of a price premium are you willing to spend versus traditional ordering? How do you order something that they didn't anticipate (e.g., a few nights ago, I wanted a buffalo chicken sandwich, but substituted blue cheese dressing for the default ranch dressing)?

The patent issues on this sort of interface are going to be very interesting. Apple claims to have a bunch of IP. It will be interesting to see whether they try to enforce it and how that all shakes out.