It does look nice.
I don't think we're that far away. Give us the apps and I don't think a configuration manager that can choose between them would be all that hard to write.
Integration with services is another issue. Isn't the simplest path to that still a robust and easy to (auto) install ns_java? Last time we had a similar discussion my impression was that once we had that a whole world of libraries would become available. Dan's done various demos but it's still a bit black-magic for our mainstream OpenACS development.