I just hope that eventually people stop being so excitable...
Here's the thing people like us tend to forget - the power of Twitter is mobility. Yes, blogs and wikis are powerful publishing platforms for people viewing them on computers.
Twitter is viewable on the most common device in the world, mobile phones. There are very few mobile phones in the world incapable of getting access to Twitter, making it potentially the most widely available social network on the planet.
No computer required.
Add in all that other media democratization stuff, and that's why you get a lot of the hoopla around it you never saw with Wikis and blogs.