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They should have used Hugin, an open source GUI based on Panotools, for stitching that panorama, it could have dealt with the uneven light levels caused by falloff of the CCD, and made a much, MUCH nicer panorama out of it.

They need to visit the Vignetting page to learn how to fix things.

If it's equirectangular (as I think it is) then it should come out nicely in ptviewer.

Dynamic range (the ability to hold shadows and highlights in a high contrast scene without a lot of fiddling) has lots of room to grow. That seems to be a tough nut to crack, especially in the smaller sensors.

exactly. while for static scenes enfuse (http://wiki.panotools.org/Enfuse) does an excellent job, dynamic ones are not doable that way.
though i have to admit that good low-light performance goal is indeed proper, having low noise result on a high iso image would also be pretty awesome.

Of other interest is the PanoTools Wiki.

Note however, that you can't make cake from crap. 'Garbage in, garbage out' as the saying goes. The whole concept of a camera on your phone, to me, is like having a television on your fridge.

No, but then again PS' tone mapping leaves a lot to be desired (hallo halos!). Something like Enfuse can give better results for that, I could even whip up a python script to run it from Gimp in a few minutes.

Voodoo is pretty great, although its automatic feature point estimation in 3D is a bit limited. For features far away, in Free Move mode, the stereo math breaks down and it only gets direction correct, while distance from the camera can be anything from -infinity to +infinity.

An option for creating a textured 3D VRML model from images is PTStereo. It is designed to work with 2 or more images that are taken far apart from each other, not a video sequence. Hugin, and SIFT can create the control points, but PTPicker must be used as the frontend for PTStereo.

Blender can import the textured vrml.

I'd say that something like ALE ("ALE is an image-processing program used for tasks such as image mosaicking, super-resolution, deblurring, noise reduction, anti-aliasing, and scene reconstruction.") is pretty creative:

http://auricle.dyndns.org/ALE/

Sure, there are some closed-source applications out there doing one or more of those things and ALE isn't the most user-friendly and intuitive tool out there, but I'd still say that it's not very much a clone of any existing application.

As an example of somewhat more commonly used OSS tools, I'd still consider PanotoolsNG as rather creative. While creating panoramas in itself isn't something really new, PanotoolsNG already includes pretty much anything needed for creation of panorama images and seem to be gaining new features at a pace that seems hard to match. I doubt that there are many closed-source panorama-making tools that are significantly more innovative. More information can be seen at:

http://wiki.panotools.org/

Of course, there are a lot of more 'cloned' OSS applications out there than the truly creative ones, but then again, the same can be also said about closed source...