In-place editing is going to be the future of all collaborative content, or at least, it's hard to imagine otherwise.
This is possibly the greatest step forward that the VisualEditor promises to bring Mediawiki. Odd that it was hardly mentioned in the tldr thread "Odd plans on Future/Parser_plan - are they true?". Perhaps some people have not tried the new editor? http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:VisualEditorSandbox
Let me please not reopen the questions of l33tism or wikitext whimsey, I simply wanted to state that clicking directly on the cursor location you want to edit is a big deal. One's poor brain does not have to shift gears; the computer actually saves you a little bit of your life (how often can you say that?); this is a good interface.
...and having a parser in Javascript will really broaden the horizons for wikipedia: embedding wiki content in another application, offline editing, abandoning legacy mediawiki code, to name a few.
-Adam