I also agree that the desktop is pretty much perfected at this point. I'm not saying UX researchers shouldn't try things - by all means, try new things. But don't expect that most of the ideas will land, because the paradigm we have really is quite good.
The Windows 95-7 paradigm was good. After that it went downhill. OSX was already downhill (probably just due to different conventions) and Linux can't stop digging deeper.
