Apropos of nothing, is it possible that time has caught up with NeWS? Given the Pythonic features and increased sophistication anticipated in the next edition of JavaScript, the ubiquity of Flash, and sophisticated languages implemented on the Java VM, a.k.a. applets, you've got multiple high-level engines with 2D rendering horsepower equivalent to PostScript. Granted these platforms have their own programming languages, but the NeWS extensions to PostScript were quite elegant and made for a darn good windowing system.
Leafing through The NeWS Book, and other histories of NeWS, I was struck how seemingly insignificant turns of fate have a big impact. Gosling helped port X10 to Sun hardware, and returned the source, eventually leading to The X Window Systems wide adoption on the UNIX platform. Essentially, Gosling shot himself in the foot.
Still waiting for the day we can have windows shaped to arbitrary paths.