CiviCRM as a RIA (Rich Internet Application)

I've been catching up on the latest happenings in the open source / RIA world. In the recent past Adobe has released their project Apollo as Adobe AIR. They have also open sourced their framework Flex to create applications for AIR. From what I've read, it seems to be getting fairly good reviews for the platform and the direction in which its headed. There are a couple of articles which talk about using a PHP backend and a FLEX frontend.

• Flex and PHP: Party in the Front, Business in the Back
• Introduction to Flex Using PHP
• Retrieving Drupal nodes with Flex 2
• Flex and PHP e-Seminar

This gives us something more to think about as we move towards 2.x and later. At some point would be good to make CiviCRM more desktop friendly. Technologies such as AIR/Flex make this much easier and something we should consider moving towards If folks have any thoughts or experience with these and other technologies, I'd love to hear about it