I am gradually [cautiously?] being hypnotized by the soft song of JavaScript. This article (and a skim over the first few pages of comments) about sums it up for me.
themaninblue.com/writing/perspe...
My examples: This page (plurib.us) is a web page that is made better with JavaScript, but degrades nicely without it. The Shrub is not a "web page" in this way, but an application that has no real functionality w/o JavaScript.