A sexy app, might sell you a system, but it tell basically nothing about the usability.

Yeah, but it makes the sale. ;-)

What you say is demonstrably true in some important cases: you don't find cutsie GUI when you visit Google. ;-) But in this case I'd say that the V8 form is *much* easier to get to grips with when you load it. And since most people can't manage more than 13 discrete items in their short-term memory anyway, the targeting of this form with a smaller more attractive list may be more "human" than a dense grid. But equally, a dense grid with all your patients displayed at once with red icons beside any patient with an abnormal blood result and a blue icon beside any patient due for the OR tomorrow is more usable than spreading the same info across several beautiful pages. I agree that it would be a mistake to present that as a NET vs VFP issue.

Of course if you're talking about a web app then it's not relevant. You can write a graphically identical browser app using PHP or VB.NET and if you use css properly you can let users skin to suit themselves. But that's 2009 thinking: some here would say that Silverlight is the only way to go in 2010. ;-)

Here's an alternative example of 2010 thinking: http://five.posterous.com/trellis-desk-20-preview-screencast . I'll bet you can't tell by looking what it is written in or what database it's using ;-) but it's freeware, and written by a student working on it part-time. People who are accustomed to earning lots of $$$ by writing the coolest UI may want to think about that.