Pipes In GUI? (Redeux)

jw3 revives an old question: "Unix wouldn't have 10% of its functionality without pipes, which allow gluing together smaller utilities and that way accomplish more complicated tasks. Fancy GUI's, however, while being nice and user-friendly and all are a totally different philosophy (see interview with David Korn, answer to question 6, which I rather fancied). Now I have found an ingenious project, called Piper, which tries to create a pipelike mechanism for a GUI interface. Interestingly enough, it is being written by biologists, who just lack the flexibility of the Unix piping mechanism, but, on the other hand, need lots of GUI for their work. What do you think about this project, fellow Slashdotters?" Based on the last conversation we've had on this topic, do you think the Piper project is a step in the right direction?