It's not like a revolutionary killer feature for me, but I just always preferred having information always in my "peripheral" instead of having to actively check a separate menu.
Years ago they were on a separate dashboard screen but that wasn't the desktop.
This seems entirely new, not any kind of full circle.
Edit: just to clarify, I'm talking about on Macs, not Windows.
https://duet-cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/0x0:1020x765/2400x1800/...
Konfabulator was a much more modern precursor to Dashboard, and existed in the early 00s. It put them directly on your desktop.
Also you could make Dashboard widgets stick around by changing a plist setting
And Konfabulator was cool but it wasn't part of the OS.
The plist setting is interesting though -- definitely never knew about that. But again, not part of how they were designed to operate for the average end user.
I used to keep a few on my desktop with this.