I would agree with the characterization that it's moving up the stack... but it does seem to (without saying it explicitly -- not clear whether that's conscious or not) start to overlap heavily with an existing space [1]. How would you differentiate it from BPM / workflow tools (one open-source example being Activiti [2], but there are many in the market)?
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process_management
[2] - http://activiti.org/
My hope is all our customers can leverage these primitives to invest more development time in their applications rather than solve the same mundane problems over and over again. I think that's the promise of a continually improving platform rather than an elbow move.
[edit: typo]