It seems like an exception is being made just because Alan Kay is a well known figure in computing. If he was some random guy who asked the very same question I feel pretty certain its status would of remained deleted.
It's far from a settled subject. Nobody is (or at least I'm not) quite sure how to treat those old questions (other than the cartoon/joke threads, of course); if you check http://stackoverflow.com/questions?sort=votes, you'll see several questions that were undeleted today, not just the Alan Kay question.
Boats, of course, are always off limits.
Now it's true that some of them did collect some useful content. Some of this content can be/has been migrated to tag wikis. Some of it could be blog material, but we haven't hammered out exactly how this will work. The bottom line is that big fun list-of-x questions are gone and won't come back.
That said, we've just undeleted Alan Kay's question since it really should be visible somewhere in the interim. Here it is: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...