Anyway, the point is not GET, PUT, and DELETE so much as it is making use of the HTTP architecture as it exists, rather than rebuilding features on top of it. As we move forward on the web, it will be more important to have a standard set of verbs, if for no other reason than to make interoperability easier.
The aspect of REST I've always liked most is the uniform interface and the way it can influence your API. The limited verbs are important because they add some constraints and make developers think twice before designating GETs to some URL to delete resources. (Just saw one example of this in an app building on top of one of my open source projects.)
David Heinemeier Hansson made a pretty good speech on the benefits of RESTful constraints when he introduced the RESTful directions of Rails. Think more about proliferating resources (nouns) and dealing with as limited a verb population as possible. This is more important to me than deciding whether to use PUT, DELETE, HEAD, etc. or faking them in overloaded POSTs.
I think the rise of RIAs goes well with the stateless constraint and code-on-demand.
Anyway, the point is not GET, PUT, and DELETE so much as it is making use of the HTTP architecture as it exists, rather than rebuilding features on top of it. As we move forward on the web, it will be more important to have a standard set of verbs, if for no other reason than to make interoperability easier.