AFAIK WPF isn't dead, its popular with line of business apps. But yeah, disappointing there's been only minor improvements to it in the last 4 years, during which they've been focusing their efforts on WinRT.
Oh I mean I use it almost every day and it has many good points, but the complete lack of interest from MS is obvious. I mean, even renaming a window doesn't work properly in Visual Studio. Most of it hasn't even been updated to use generics. It still uses DX9. But there's no better option.