Perhaps for the applications of yesterday (like Basecamp) this is the case, but the real innovation taking place is around collecting massive amounts of data and processing it in interesting ways. These systems are used every day to make quantified business decisions rather than best guessing based on someone's hunch. 37signals builds questionably good UIs on-top of a database, something people have been doing for decades now. The future is in augmenting intelligence by gathering massive amounts of data and reducing it for human consumption.