Thanks for the response Shaun, I've been watching the UI blog with the user testing and it has been very interesting and insightful - had me rethinking my own plugin a bit too.

I do wonder & hope a more poweruser-type interface can be created that matches the ambition of WDS's mockups. When you have a site with 5+ widget areas and different display settings for widgets, those types of scenarios are quite hard to build a nice intuitive UI for. I realize that might be non-core territory and maybe WDS will step in regardless of how the widgets UI evolves in core. I also love the ideas for a better way to visually link widget areas to actual layout - that's a tough one to implement. It's going to be interesting to watch development in any case.