The problem I see with the ReacTable is the requirement of having physical doodads. What happens when you run out of LFO widgets? Run to the store and buy more?

The payment thingy demonstrated on the Microsoft web site is kinda neat, though. Drag the items you bought to your card, and the items your friend bought to his card. Of course, waitstaff do that for you now. It's neat, though.

There's an undeniable neat factor. We'll have to wait and see what comes out of it.

I was listening to a short discussion about it on NPR, and someone pointed out "what if a woman puts her purse on the table and it's got her cell phone and camera in it?" It was not sufficiently answered.

Something else that was pointed out is that much of the things that seem precursor to this, from touchscreen interfaces on ATMs to tablet PCs, are really just mouse replacement technologies, and what makes this so special is the fact that multiple styluses can be working at once, and that's true. I've often wished you could attach multiple mice and keyboards to a PC and have multiple people work on one computer at the same time. This answers that question. However, 90% of the demonstrations on the Microsoft web site didn't show off that interface at all. And most of that 10% were just multiple people working at the same time. Only very few showed one person manipulating one thing in multiple ways simultaneously, and that was largely just resizing and turning. Not that I can think of anything better to do with it, but still, they've supposedly been working on it for five years.