Salesforce.com launches AppExchange

I know this is from last week, but i just got to playing with AppExchange this week and I gotta say it's pretty damn cool. I hit the "Test Drive" button on a couple of the apps and checked them out. If I had an account with SFdC (which obviously I don't) I could have logged in and downloaded one. In addition, there are reviews and a 5 star rating system. It's slick and user friendly.

Also, today I had a call with an analyst from Forrester today. She had an interesting insight:
Most of the partner apps on AppExchange bridge functionality gaps in the core SFdC offering. SAP has most of this functionality built into our core product set.

What is cool is that partners can now build apps on the SFdC data model. Formerly, you had to do a data import/export.