There are several purposes for a default theme... getting newbies online fast and intuitively, troubleshooting when your premium theme has a blowout, highlighting the WP technology for reliability and intelligent design, and of course continuing the open source collaboration. I would like to see the new default theme to include drag and drop layout the way widgets are now... and the way blogger has been for years. I'd also like to see a configuration panel where basic css changes can be made by newbies like default width, sidebar width, background color and image, wrapper colors, header image, footer image. That can be done in a bullet-proof way so newbies can bypass it and users on the learning curve can play with the ability to reset to default values when they get in trouble. Premium Themes have better support and more elaborate configuration options than WP can possibly provide, so they should not feel threatened by advances built into the WP default theme.