Very cool.  And consistent with my experience. 

In an explanatory article, How Galorath Quantified the Salesforce.com Platform, there are a couple of interesting nuggets hidden all the way at the bottom:

"For applications that are consistent with the built in capabilities of the SalesForce.com Platform, there appears to be about an 80% reduction in the actual development effort. Because of the ability to create with point-and-click operations to support prototyping, the requirements and design effort is reduced with estimates ranging from 10% to 25%."

You read that right: 80% reduction in development effort.  Wow.

And, since I’m a nitpicker, I’m going to pick on one thing.  Galorath writes:

"APEX does not provide UI services or support external web service calls, the primary focus is to provide data oriented transactional services – more like Stored Procedures in Oracle or SQL Server."

The web services call issue is just incorrect.  APEX absolutely supports those.  And the UI services section — I think this is splitting hairs.  APEX doesn’t, but Visualforce does.

Oh and since I’m really a nitpicker, it’s not "SalesForce.com" with a capital "F".  It’s lower case.  C’mon people.

Glad to see Force.com getting some good formal attention.  Now if we could just get some Z notation animators for it.