I've dove deep into Silverlight as the company I work for has me writing an extensive Silverlight app. I do question the choice of Silverlight and Silverlight's future on the web everyday because I have yet to come across something we are doing in SL that couldn't be done in HTML and Javascript.
I have changed my tune a bit though as I've come to appreciate Silverlight is extremely well designed and extremely powerful. Does Silverlight really have a compelling, deep future on websites? Eh, I don't know. Should Silverlight have some kind of compelling worthwhile future, be it on phones, tablets, media centers and desktop apps? IMO, absolutely, it's a superb platform. For example, if Windows Phone 7 can gain some marketshare, I'll be tickled. As I'd take Silverlight over CocoaTouch any day.
For a pet project I wrote exactly the same component in Silverlight and Flex - I much preferred Flex even though I rather like C# as a language. Now that the fortunes of SVG seem to be reviving I see that as a better long term bet for what I want to do.
Personally, I think Silverlight is an irrelevance: hardly anyone uses it on the public Web and on internal applications there isn't quite the need to make things quite as pretty as Silverlight allows.
Microsoft needs to stop assuming that people care enough to read paragraphs of marketing-speak. It's ludicrous that it took them 1500 words to say that they're a faster version of Flash and that they're not stepping on HTML5's toes.
Broadly-implemented standards are like paved roads. They help the industry move forward together. But before you can pave a road, someone needs to blaze a trail.
I have changed my tune a bit though as I've come to appreciate Silverlight is extremely well designed and extremely powerful. Does Silverlight really have a compelling, deep future on websites? Eh, I don't know. Should Silverlight have some kind of compelling worthwhile future, be it on phones, tablets, media centers and desktop apps? IMO, absolutely, it's a superb platform. For example, if Windows Phone 7 can gain some marketshare, I'll be tickled. As I'd take Silverlight over CocoaTouch any day.