This came through on twitter via @jthake before:
http://www.chakkaradeep.com/post/2009/08/19/SharePoint-2010-Introducing-the-Client-Object-Model.aspx
I’m really excited about this one – finally we can start using a standardised object model and not have to worry about how weather we are going to use web services, or the local object model. The most powerful/exciting part to all of this (in my opinion) is the ability to talk with the object model directly via your Silverlight applications – this makes it so much easier/compelling to build rich, user focused, high-reach applications on top of the SharePoint platform.
I can see a lot of potential with this – it would be quite easy to build a silverlight front-end for SharePoint by interacting directly with the client object model – if you were to do this using web services it would take forever! Your other alternative I guess would have been to write some RIA services wrapping the OM and call them out of silverlight – but I guess now we don’t have to 
Nice!
