@Len - I've never been a fan of merging the two either after my experience with using a phpbb bridge with Joomla. Boy did that backfire on me when the bridge developer stopped working on it. That meant that whenever Joomla or phpbb updated, I had to wait for an updated version of the bridge. Needless to say, it didn't take long to get screwed. Thankfully, the developer helped people unbridge their sites.

Still, I don't think it's cool to see content on the site disappear in favor of a forum. How does that make any sense? Instead, a seperate WP install on a sub-domain seems to make more sense. But that seems like a lot more work than just installing a forum plugin.

@chris mccoy - It does have an appealing design.