I think kapowaz ought to actually try the tools for himself - perspective is a wonderful thing and all that. In all honestly, the new tools look genuinely exciting in their scope and power: what you can achieve in a very small amount of time _without code_ (including animation and triggered events) is astounding. The push here isn't just for interface abstraction (which, frankly, is far more important in some circumstances than others) but for vector based drawing (i.e. scalability) with close coupling to directx (you can have 3d viewports that are truely interactive without the worries of hit testing on vertices etc). My interest in .NET in general has been limited by the same factors that cripple JAVA (hogs memory, low speed) but also by the fact it's so obviously web centric - great if you're writing database apps (as I once did many moons ago) but crappy for UI work (e.g. Windows Forms which really were just managed versions of what we already had).
Grab yourself a copy of MS Expression - have a play!