WSRP - Web Services for Remote Portlets - do we really need it?

I already mentionned WSRP (Web Services for Remote Portlets) a couple of times on this blog - see SharePoint integration scenarios with SAP and WSRP.Net framework and SharePoint and recently Mike also wrote some interesting stuff about WSRP - Time To Discusss WSRP.... Some interesting points:

WSRP defines how to use SOAP to request and receive blocks of HTML (as opposed to making a method request and getting back XML data, which is what we usually request/receive using SOAP

WSRP is not magic. Its also not a shortcut to good application design

I had a discussion about the benefits of WSRP a couple of months ago with a colleague and the thing which actually sparked the discussion was this other posting about WSRP - WSRP vs RSS? Game over. - my own short synopsis:

SharePoint v3 will provide OOB a WSRP consumer webpart

WSRP will never make it because of a couple of reasons: the user experience is not very good, the spec is too complex and RSS already provides a much simpler syndication protocol (although it is not really fair to compare the two)

For some more comments about WSRP check out this post as well - WSRP is really hot and WSRP and JSR168 Are Two Completely Different Things...