This is pretty exciting stuff. IIRC ibdknox used to work on Visual Studio when he was at Microsoft.
A number of the ideas presented here started brewing during my time there, but it took me a bit to figure out what the overall abstraction should be. I really love the drafting table parallel - it's especially interesting when you start thinking about what we can do with touch...
I can't help but think of a drafting pad and drafting notebook to allow us to work on our system everywhere...