Let's be blunt: Dashboard was an abortion because Apple wasn't smart enough (or fast enough, or diplomatic enough; lord knows what the actual issue was) to buy Konfabulator before Yahoo did. So they threw together a half-assed copy with a crippled UI metaphor that was different from Konfab primarily as a means of heading off the otherwise inevitable lawsuits. Shockingly, a critical mass of user and developer interest never managed to congeal around the product that emerged from such an, um, enlightened development process.

Of course the saddest part of the whole story was that Yahoo, being Yahoo, managed to crush the life out of Konfab as a product, so instead where there was once a single, popular widget platform on OSX there are now two failed ones. So that's nice.