>The main "difference" is FP's tight coupling of language with data. How long do you think it will be before this is seen as a fantastic innovation in dotNET or some other popular tool? ;-)

I don't think it really matters if it is considered an innovation or something copied from another product. What matters is that it gets added and exists for .NET developers to use. There are many new control data-binding features in .NET WinForms created in VS 2005, and the designers of those features actually had VFP on their machine and they got demos of how VFP data-binding works. Then they took those ideas and new ones and implemented improvements for the data-binding story. The same is happening now for data-centric language functionality for future .NET programming.