I don't dispute that Wave makes an excellent backchannel for a conference – it's without a doubt a better final result than Twitter. As a matter of form though, what I found objectionable was the complete lack of acknowledgement that Twitter serves this function today, and Wave likely just isn't ready to take over. Aside from the general complexity differences between Wave and Twitter, there is no easy way to integrate them. Even with the bot you mention (which sounds nifty!) there doesn't seem to be a way to push info back out to Twitter where the conversation is currently taking place.

And that leads to the issue I outlined above – I grant that presenting Wave as a medium agnostic has advantages, but it doesn't reflect the reality of the real world. To pull it off, Wave will need a UI that is on par with Apple – and that just isn't the case (currently).
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Though I take the point about using Wave for event planning, it's consistently the best/only use case I hear for Wave. Which is why I suggested above, that perhaps that ought to be the marketing strategy for Wave. If it's not an all-in-one solution right now, that's okay, it will work toward that. Under promise, over deliver.
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I constantly have to remind myself that Wave is just a preview. I see the potential, and I want so much to use the third generation UI that I'm sure y'all at Google are working on. Thanks again to all at Google!

I think that Twitter will always be a great backchannel for quoting conference speakers and tweeting about what you find interesting. I've actually created a Twitter search bot to supplement my conference bot, but didn't show that. (It would pull in all the tweets for a particular hashtag for a timerange).

The waves serve as a good way for taking notes on the whole event, for collating links to resources, and then also for letting people have more conversations, take surveys, make plans for pub crawls, etc.

Re visual layout -

I didn't mean to skip that question, it was a good question. We've looked into more control of visual layout, but it will take some time to figure out how to do that with an easy-to-understand UI. (Or how to only expose something like that to power users). As you've seen, the Wave UI is complex enough on its own.

I've taken down notes of the questions/concerns (both from the wave & twitter backchannel) regarding Wave for journalism & shared them with the rest of the team. It was interesting to hear what journalists are most concerned about & interested in — I usually only hear from the developer technology crowd. Thanks for coming, and for sharing your feedback here.

Glad you could make it and enjoyed the event — and hope we can talk more when you come next time. I totally agree with many of your points here.

I was a bit disappointed that their presentation became such a long product pitch and that we didn't have more chances to interact and explore real use cases relating to journalism. They could have started much more dramatically — for example, by talking about how Wave was used in the Seattle manhunt. Instead, they went into an long explanation of features.

I did learn from their demo how to better use Wave. But if all users require so much hand holding to unlock the real value, they have a lot more work to do on to make the UI more intuitive. Just creating a public Wave and pointing people to it was odd (add the Public contact to the Wave?)

As one friend said to me, it's sort of like a concept car now — those far fetched visions of the future that automakers put out at auto shows but might never really get made.

Burt