A couple of quick points.

From Frankies comment I agree browsers themselves will play a major part and offer some good extension points but I still think ‘one broswer to rule them all’ will never happen (as much as any of the vendors wnat it) .. so while things like XUL and Prism are great they are only available in one browser.

Moving on to Phils comments .. having used all 4 technologies (AiR, Flex, WPF, Silverlight) I can see where Mike is coming from as using AIR is a very pleasent frictionless experience compared with deploying a WPF (or Silverlight) app. With AIR (simplest example) point at a web page on your HD and its becomes a dekstop app, updating is handled exceptionally well too.

I suppsoe AIR is more directly comparible to WPF / XBAP but microsoft dont seem to be doing themselves many favours in the clarification of what should be used where.

Microsoft are working hard and with silverlight2 beta2 many of the controls in siverlight are directly comparible with their WPF equivilents so you can see a future where you can use the same XAML between either framework (up to a certain point).

Some of this also comes down to the fact that microsoft target programmers and adobe target designers, so adobes demos will always look a tonne better than any microsoft ones even if programattically they dont do anything exciting, but its what the kidz want huh ? 😛