I've been excited about the concept behind Google Gears for some time. Now google rewards my laziness with a framework web developers can use to make their web services remain available when their users are offline.
Many of the strategies for connecting the next 2 billion people to the net involve various 'slow networking' strategies where internet connectivity is intermittent ie. United Villages and postmanet. Now it should be possible for users in these types of environments to continue using their favorite web applications.