Yep, tools evolve and you should keep up, nothing new there. However the only thing that has ever really mattered has been to achieve good outcomes for our users. Everything else is self-indulgent tripe really. But hey, we love that.

I could learn nothing useful from the slides :(

the part about css frameworks was somewhat interesting.

I think jQuery etc are a pretty nice answer to cross browser compatibility issues, they're not a slam dunk to the point where you never have to worry about it again, but they do a pretty good job to make a landscape designed my microsoft to be as inconsistent as possible into something a lot more tolerable.

The missing piece of the puzzle for me has always been layout, how practical / realistic is it to expect the same amount of smoothing there from CSS frameworks as you get from the javascript world with JS frameworks?