There are lots of details missing. But replicating the whole wave was not the point of the demo.
The point was to show that we are not forced to use complex frameworks like SproutCore or GWT to build desktop-like app layouts. It's still possible to build them staying lean and simple.
And by staying simple you can move times faster. The demo was written in 2 evenings by a single developer.
First off, don't take the following in the wrong way, it is simply constructive criticism and the main point I'm trying to make is to highlight what makes your framework special.
In this case, I don't think putting this together in 2 evenings with 100+ lines of code is special. I think the "general" layout of most apps/sites can be accomplished with any framework in 2 evenings, and Wave's general layout is not particularly complex, especially considering that you chose to avoid defining window resizing behavior (or perhaps its just broken) and the ability to reorganize these panes (which I believe Wave can do). Not to mention that there is no indication anywhere as to how many lines it took GWT to do this, so for all I know 100 lines is double what it takes in GWT.
In all honesty, if a framework can't put together this general layout in 2 evenings it has to be a truly terrible framework. Despite SproutCore and GWT being "competitors" to our Cappuccino, I'm not going to pretend that it wouldn't be possible to throw this together with their stuff given 2 evenings. In fact, it should even be possible with just pure HTML/CSS/JS to come up with this in that time frame. I mean, its literally 4 panes and a couple of buttons.
By not implementing any of the dynamic behavior its not really clear how on earth this is "better" than GWT, unless you're trying to sell it as a mockup framework. And by dynamic behavior I don't mean actually implementing "playback" of course, I mean things like making the overflow menus work. Because without that, I'm not sure what your framework provides: "Do they just not have menus, or was 2 evenings not enough time to put the menus in?"
Now, from personal experience, I think the real problem is that demos like this are always asking for trouble. Of course no one is ever going to actually re-implement Wave, so there is never a clear comparison. I recall when Capp first shipped someone tried to make a jquery version of one of our demos in X lines, and OF COURSE the discussion devolved into whether you should count the CSS lines or not. Clearly this was not helpful to anyone in determining which framework was "better".
Now, I would have loved to see a narrated video of you putting this together (or better yet a custom design) because I think that actually gives people an idea of the layout capabilities of your framework. Then you can say things like "normally X is hard, but all we have to do is add Y...". Something like those time lapse photoshop videos, only with the iterations required to get to this.
The point was to show that we are not forced to use complex frameworks like SproutCore or GWT to build desktop-like app layouts. It's still possible to build them staying lean and simple.
And by staying simple you can move times faster. The demo was written in 2 evenings by a single developer.