What’s So Special About Widgets?

Everyone’s talking about widgets.  Bloggers love to put them on the sidebar, various web2.0 services offer up ways to widgetize your website, and darn near anything you can find on the web can be found somehow in widget form.  Jeremy Zawodny notes the downsides to widgets, third-party integration such as widgets managed to crash TechCrunch, and tonight over at Publishing 2.0 Scott Karp wonders if widgets will hit a block and never be “mainsteam” as he compares them to the adoption of RSS.

Huh?  How would something used by site publishers get mainstream?  Joe Blow who’s surfing the web doesn’t care.  Will widgets become common amongst publishers? I would say yes, and they already have.  I just don’t see what all the fuss is about what amounts to a plugin or an include on a webpage.  It’s a chunk of code to provide some drop-in function.  Why the crazy amount of buzz?