Jon Udell echoes the silent majority in saying, "There's been a lot of talk about replacing email with RSS. I don't buy it." RSS is overkill to deal with ad-hoc, unsolicited, one-to-one communication.
So you say it can be fixed up? Well let me put it to you this way. If you thought the Necho/Pie/RSS/funky feed wars were meanspirited, tedious, and unproductive, imagine the same debates with billions of dollars at stake. For every RSS user currently, there must be 100's, if not thousands of SMTP/IMAP users.
Actually, it wouldn't be much of a war, because Microsoft would take the opportunity presented by the confusion created in overhauling the system to stamp out all the other e-mail vendors.
E-mail is too big to fail.