You are right on the money, Roger. Everything in the workplace stems from work products (and that's a fit name for them as well).
At my company, the email system is expected to shoulder the burden of shuttling every work product back and forth. Revision control is nonexistant and everyone's inbox is choked with hundreds of megabytes of redundant attachments. Plus, if you weren't cc'd on the message, you won't be part of the conversation.
One would like at the core of dotWRK a repository of all such work-related data. The ability to freely organize and associate the work products into meaningful hierarchies and structures is what will make the system powerful. Ideally, revision control would be automatic and nearly transparent. We shouldn't make any assumptions about the formats that these work products will use, nor the tools used to author and interact with them.
An excellent resource for motivating this design is just about everything written by Jon Udell, especially his excellent and overlooked book: Practical Internet Groupware.
