There are still huge conceptual leaps to be made in the notion of a computer as a document creator and content rendering, and Smalltalk provides some clues in that direction, though I doubt we'll see it in my lifetime, considering the weight of the last twenty-five years will make it difficult to change course.
The relevance of the above flight of fantasy to your point is that LaTeX, for all its awkwardness, is absolutely a local maxima in document creation, and I love seeing its results appear from the markup, knowing that it's following the numbers precisely, as if by magic, and print them out and marvel at the quality of the fonts close-up, and we need more such systems with which to create and render content, before denting the DOM+CSS hegemony in the manner I described above.