The Lytro is definitely a gimmick product. It shoots only tiny little images that are useful only with their player stack and contain only a handful of focus points, which can't be chosen.

This means you won't be able to do much with the images other than post them to Facebook. You may not get any one image to focus at all on the part you consider the most important to be in focus.

Apart from having a super-powerful incarnation of this technology able to create images with the fidelity of the top SLRs with many more focus points, allowing the shooter to pick the primary, I don't really see the point for general photography.

How many times are you ever going to refocus an image? It adds a lot of hassle, and in its current incarnation, requires an additional post-processing step that most people just aren't interested in.

As far as licensing goes, there are already other companies with higher-end solutions to this problem. The Lytro is likely borne out of the inability to convince any existing camera manufacturers to jump on the technology yet.

When 3D isn't flying, I'm not sure this has much of a future in the consumer space - not for a few years yet anyway. Too much hassle, little to no benefit, poor quality images.