[ntpeters]

I've been trying to follow things pretty closely too, and to me it looks like that is (partially) the next step. Disclosure: I'm definitely a supporter, and think it's a cool project.

Right now it seems like the big things are building out the network and tools, to make the next stage easier. Their release schedule states that the next major release (what they call Metropolis) will happen when they have 1.0 stable release of the native wallet/browser. A couple of IDEs are also in the works, built to work with developing smart contracts for Ethereum. Even Microsoft has added Solidity (essentially a DSL for Ethereum, for those who don't know) support to the latest preview of Visual Studio.

Also, from everything I've been seeing so far is that the dev community forming around Ethereum is very passionate and is grow faster than most expected. If it continues at this pace, and the tools continue to improve with it, Ethereum could continue to become a very robust platform.

All this said, things could still not work out and the project could fail. I would hope it doesn't, because it really is a cool experiment thus far.