A key element of the project was their custom Sugar Linux desktop environment which would have wireless collaboration and data sharing as a central feature, and a suite of custom educational software to run in that environment. The OLPC Foundation never fully delivered on that promise -- the software they shipped was buggy and incomplete, with few applications available and many of the promised features stubbed out or completely absent. The only real saving grace was that their desktop environment included wrappers for Firefox and OpenOffice, and that was enough to make the systems useful to students.

The OLPC Foundation went on to create a series of increasingly ridiculous design renders of future projects -- dual-screen laptops, tablets with solar cells on the back, ultra-thin tablets... none of these were manufactured. Most of them weren't even technologically feasible!

The OLPC project did jump-start interest in ultralight laptops, though, and probably led to the development of early netbooks like the Eee PC. So there's that.