Twitter's fail whale is universally cute and disarming. If some portion of Wave's audience is skeeved out by the maintenance page with unpleasant feet, it needs fixing. (Especially for unplanned maintenance.)
I've now asked four women. They all had the same negative reaction.
I love to see that they're using jQuery for the animations. I'm anxious to see more people going this route over Flash. Not that there is anything wrong with Flash, and it may very well be better suited for this type of work, I just want to see the uses and plugins for jQuery continue to evolve.
Newer WebKit browsers use the GPU to accelerate css-transform animations (giving your CPU a break). Check out the example on this page in the latest version of Chrome or Safari, for example:
Thanks for the resource link. I can't wait until Firefox can do this. I want to use webkit animation in my website, but for now they would only work in Safari and Chrome.
Of course, you're not comparing fair examples of SWF vs. jQuery. I guess it's ok to ignore the obvious advantages of Flash if you can bash a full features app or animation compared to the Google Wave error page.
What's good about using JavaScript and known libraries is that you can just write a userscript to reduce the framerate. With Flash, it would be all or nothing.
I don't think that I have ever seen their web site down, but in the last 3 months (or so), a few times my robots stopped getting event notifications for brief periods of time.
But, hey, the system is in beta. I'm pretty much enthusiastic about Wave: I'm writing a DevX article right now on Wave robot programming, and I have a business idea using the Wave platform that I want to try out.