I, too, think that getting Steve back was the right move, with NeXTSTEP as an added bonus. I'm just sad that BeOS died an undignified death - a few years ago I bought a BeOS CD off eBay and was very impressed with the OS. It was more responsive on a 100MHz machine than Windows XP was on a 2GHz machine. Yes, I know there's Haiku, but they're really just catching up to where BeOS was 15 years ago. Imagine what BeOS would be like today if it continued to be developed and improved.
Haiku shows a lot of promise despite how few developers they have. You should really give it a spin, especially when they hit beta.
If they finish their Wifi implementation (it works, even with WPA2 now, just doesn't have a complete GUI), bring their Webkit browser up-to-date, and get a bit more stability it would be a pleasant system to use on a day-to-day basis.
I honestly think if it had the momentum of a larger community, it could easily be open source's triumph on the desktop.
