The toy interfaces thing interests me, because it ended up being the subject of debate at ETech this year.

The theme of the whole conference was magic, and many of the talks ran this into the ground, as expected. There were many cool, magical, toy-like things shown. My favorite was a nod towards Konami's Tamagotchi-like Otoizm, which sits between your headphones and your music source and grows based on what kind of music you give it.

And then it goes out and generates music it thinks you'd like.

Oh, and it wirelessly finds other people with one and compares how compatible you are based on music preferences.

Anyhow, there was one presentation that stood out as rebuking the whole interface-as-magic thing; Adam Greenfield basically said that magic/toys/seamlessness was crap, and that people should strive for "seamfulness, but with beautiful seams". Too often, toy interfaces gloss over too much (as you mentioned) and don't expose themselves for add-on functionality and/or API hooks.

The point: I think there's a happy medium to be reached. I'd rather have a interface with some seams that still encouraged me to explore.

But that's just me.