Starting with the interface in Minority Report, and culminating in the Apple iPhone, we are finally starting to see some movement away from the traditional keyboard/mouse/windows style of interaction to richer ones.
The grandaddy of these is Jeff Han's Mutitouch (which I saw demoed at Etech, amazing). Microsoft follows this with -- the Surface, and of course the iPhone. On a different note is the BumpTop -- which seeks to take the desktop metaphor to the next level my replicating real world structures like stacks coupled with an interaction model that duplicates real-world physics.
This notion of movement and direct manipulation makes for a more pleasant experience and is one reason for the appeal of the iPhone -- the idea of "touching your music" somehow brings you closer to the thing at hand -- finding something good to listen to -- in this sense the device is out of your way.
