But the government is inescapably bad at IT today and seemingly has been since the World Wide Web was first launched.
I hope that can change too, but I don't see that happening as long as the divergence between civilian sector pay and government benefits remains so crazy. This has sucked much (though not all) of the best technical talent (and worse, tech-savvy managers) out of the public sector. Without a critical mass, all of your really skilled geeks in government find it almost impossible to advocate for the right answer, and the policy makers and supervisors are usually not able to tell the difference between the right answer and other, non-feasible, courses of action proposed by the unskilled geeks in government.
To top that off, when the government can't build things using civil servants alone they have to fall back to contractors, but our contracting processes are so insane that it doesn't surprise me at all that our government contracting officers find it impossible to hire and oversee the best companies to deliver and maintain a working project. There have been successes but IMHO when that has happened, it's because the contracting officer has blindly stumbled into a decent contractor.
I'm excited for 18F because a lot of the problem comes down to educating our public sector middle management into what's possible and what's not possible. By demonstrating by example and by explanation of what's already possible in current rules, 18F can boost the stock of the buried geeks hiding out in many of our government agencies.