Luckily, Wolfram Alpha has enough funding (and ego) behind it to survive for at least five years. If they throw serious effort into it during all that time, I'll bet we'll end up with something truly impressive (if perhaps not life-changing).

The core flaw with Wolfram Alpha in my opinion is that it relies on curated data. Such data takes time to source, verify, and translate into the necessary target format.

I sincerely hope the same thing for Wolfram Alpha that I do with the Palm Pre: that it'll get the market leader off its ass and spur true competition.