I liked Konfabulator when it came out, so much so that I paid my fee to run it. I still like it, except that the overhead of all those yummy looking widgets seems to eat more memory than I generally have (too many open apps).

So Dashboard …. here's my take;

• Development - it uses standard HTML with CSS and Javascript - great for me (no learning new APIs - although I'm sure that the Konfabulator ones are probably dead easy).
• WebKit - because they run inside webkit, I suppose (please correct me), they can access any plugins webkit can such as Flash, Shockwave, Quicktime
• Mac OS X 10.3.9 uses roughly the same Webkit as 10.4 so you can actually see and test widgets now - pretty cool. And, if you enable the Debug menu in Safari you can even make the background of the HTML page transparent (although it will still have it's page title bar).
• Loads of community interest - not sure why but Konfabulator seemed to get a little stuck with regards to new widgets; loads of clocks and webcams and search boxes. I can only guess it's to do with developers, like me, never quite getting round to learning the API. Once you get into the mindset that a dashboard widget is a little webpage, it opens up the creative possibilities
• Memory / CPU etc. I really hope that Dashboard is less memory / CPU intensive than Konfabulator. Who knows (yet)!? Not me.