Yeh, those are good. Though they seem to have appeared shortly after the Dyson blade dryers. Dyson seem to have shaken the market a bit into realising you actually need power in these things for them to be useful.
No, the XLERATORS predate the dyson airblade by ~4-5 years. The dyson just made people realize that they were more expensive than the garbage units people used before, but not that expensive.
I checked and I spec'd an XLERATOR in 2004, and I think they became available the year before. The dyson took another 2-3 years to reach market, so 4-5 years is probably overstating it.
Either way Excel were the innovators. Dyson just made it look cool. The apple-style marketers who charged 2x as much so could afford some stupid overengineering.