* First of all, the OP mixes up LaTeX and TeX. TeX is written in a very portable language and has been ported to more platforms than most other software, including PDP-10 and others.
* You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?
"One binary" is a bit optimistic; even if you never do anything fancy with fonts, you'll want bibtex. And makeindex, if you're writing a large work. PSTricks does not work with PDFLaTeX (Tikz is arguably better than PSTricks, but PSTricks won't be dead anytime soon). XeLaTeX is required to use system fonts easily.
And that's before getting into anything truly gross.
I am running a TeX distribution with only one binary. And with bibliography and index: these could be done with the Lua part of LuaTeX. True about the others.
Indeed, Norman Ramsey essentially reimplemented Bibtex in Lua: look at bibtex.lua.in in his Nbibtex; tarball avilable from http://www.cs.tufts.edu/~nr/nbibtex/
> * You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?
A lot of TeX uses Computer Modern to typeset the body (a metafont font) and I don't think I have ever see a TeX document that doesn't use Computer Modern or Euler (another metafont font) for equation typesetting.
I also wonder whether it's possible to achieve the excellent equation typesetting capabilities of TeX without metafont.
Metafont is hardly used these days. All TeX distributions use either a Type1 font of Computer Modern or Latin Modern. And the equation typesetting has nothing(!) to do with Metafont. Everything is set into the TeX binary (and its formats). You just need a good math font (and that is not trivial, but not related to Metafont)
Yep, it always surprises me how few people change off the default Computer Modern -- which I find really spindly and ugly -- given that a single \usepackage{...} will give you a beautiful Palatino, for example. I sometimes suspect they're just wanting to hit me in the face with the fact that they're LaTeX users...
Computer modern is a nice font for documents that contain equations. I suspect that it is because of the subtle changes in density. But for normal prose it really doesn't work very well.
Palatino for text is fine, but what math fonts go well with it? I think them main reason I use Computer Modern is that the math and text fonts look so good together.
* LaTeX is working on the iPad, see for example: http://meeting.contextgarden.net/2010/talks/2010-09-14-arthu...
* LuaTeX (http://luatex.org) is written in C, not WEB.
* You only need one binary to work with TeX. Either PDFTeX or LuaTeX. All other binaries are just glue code (for example to generate missing Metafont fonts, but who wants them these days anyway?