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The standard non-ergonomic keyboard.
You call that a keyboard? THIS is a keyboard!

Second place: Point-and-click electronic-device-plus-finger-paradigm user-interfaces.
It's pretty hard to create something more inefficient... (as an UI. Even the command shell is faster.)

I believe this is it. I did not see it. http://nion.modprobe.de/blog/archives/660-123467890.html

• Why Plan 9 is not dead yet And What we can learn from it by Ron Minnich from the Advanced Computing Lab, Los Alamos National Lab.
  
• The Ubiquitous File Server in Plan 9 by Dr. C. H. Forsyth of Vitanuova
  

Cool solution to dealing with overlapping windows, but why deal with them at all?

I've always thought that overlapping windows caused more trouble than problems they solve. It looked advanced back in the day, and was great with small screens, and sometimes you still want to use it, but I'd find it more useful for typical use if windows diddn't overlap unless you forced them to (by continuing to drag for instance).

Or, coming from the other direction, some wish-list ideas I had while using ion are the ability to detach windows into temporary floating windows, resize neigboring frames by dragging one frame's titlebar, and somehow making it easier to use things like the Gnome panel in ion.

I recommend trying ion and similar window managers like LarsWM and Ratpoison and WMI.

Unfortunately to make window managers truly helpful, they will need to have more information about what its windows *mean* than is currently available from X11. For example, it's error prone trying to deduce whether Window X and Window Y are considered part of the same application by the user. Gnome and KDE do a pretty good job of it (e.g. grouping windows by application in the window list/task bar) but it's not perfect. And this is just the most basic information. Other useful info which could modify window behavior is how often a window is used or updated, when it was run, by what means was it launched (menu, button, terminal?), various categorizations and semantic tagging attached to the application permanently or to the window temporarily, etc.

A great advantage of an X11 system is the flexibility to experiment with the window manager, I hope to see more cool stuff in the future, especially from Gnome, KDE, and the distributions' choices.

This is idiocy. KDE is a great many things, but usable is not one of them.

One of the first mistakes in a discussion on useability is generalising useability.

I for instance find OSX confusing and distracting, prefer WMI as a DE http://wmi.modprobe.de/ but enjoy teaching on KDE Linux machines. Given that OSX, for instance, is projected as the canon of Useability, then I obviously prefer counter-productive and complex environments.

Having taught students on Linux, Windows and OSX systems in intensive situations I have seen too much to homogenise what is 'useable', and what is not. Rather I watch what my students enjoy using, what they don't, and the Total Cost of Use in a productivity driven academic context.

In this regard, teaching primary OSX and Windows users alike, KDE3.4 has been a total hit; itself been the seed of many migrations off both Windows and OSX (without a prod from my biased stick).

The same could not be said a few years ago of course, however the KDE project now seems to offer a formiddable and impressive productivity suite.

Have a look at wmi. I found it rather more intuitive than Ratpoison (which I only tried very briefly, admittedly).

Have you looked at WMI? After I used ion, I was hooked on framed window management, but the gimp, dia, file selection dialogs, etc. don't work very well under ion. WMI has the framed approach, but also supports floating windows on the same workspace as frames.

Window Manager Improved (WMI) is quite good. It can be used mouseless or with a mouse and has VI-like bindings for the former. It also comes in a single binary and only depends on XTL and Xlib.

Unlike other mouse-free wm flavors this one looks pretty good, too.