I listen to a lot of podcast series these days (a great way of filling up my one hour train commute) and I've recently subscribed to Perspectives with Jon Udell.
This morning I listened to his latest one Where is WinFS now? which featured an interview with Quentin Clark from the SQL Server team. Quentin was prominent on the supposedly ill-fated WinFS project but in actual fact he explains how a lot of the technologies developed as part of WinFS have manifested themselves in released technologies today. Entity Framework, HierarchyID data type & Filestream are all set to be released in the next three or four months and all were incubated in WinFS.
Well worth a listen if you like understanding how and where technologies originate.
-Jamie