As a Flash dev for 10 years, Flex dev for the last 3 years... Silverlight is really aimed at RIA dev that happens to cross-over into the Internet... much like Flex. It's really a fight between Eclipse with MXML/AS3 for Flex versus Visual Studio .NET with XAML/JScript for Silverlight.

With that said, I'd like to be able use Silverlight since I'm prototyping some projects, but I'd honestly love to see AIR on the platform moreso than Silverlight.

I don't doubt your expertise, gerbick, but the communications I've been sent essentially sell Silverlight as "Flash on steroids". But maybe that's a misrepresentation by some advocates.

Its not on steroids yet - it will be when 2.0 comes out, but 1.0 is quite limited.

EDIT: Unless 2.0 already is out (didn't check )

That was the same sell for Flex during it's 1.0 days. Silverlight, at it's core, is truly targeting Flash; however with the understanding that Rich Internet Applications can also be browser based too is first, then second that Flex outputs a *.swf just like Flash does.

So Silverlight will go after one or the other and Flex doesn't have the mindshare of Flash since it just requires the Flash plugin and that's all the end-user knows/sees.

Marketing at it's best. Go after what people know the best.

I will go on record to say that Silverlight Mobile, from what I've seen is just as tight as SVG-T. And that's impressive to me... but not enough to fully endorse it in most of my upcoming projects.