Seeing as I have designed thermostats, I guess I should chime in!
Yo!: Done
http://www.venstar.com/Thermostats/ColorTouch/
I’m confident there are another half a dozen energy monitoring thermostats in development. It is obvious!
As for the importance of design, consider this:
This is a Gestetner machine, basically a mechanical/chemical copy machine invented at the beginning of the 1900’s. This one has a purely functional design based on the needs of the machine.
This is the 1929 Gestetner machine. It was the beginning of the Great Depression, but the company did something entirely mad: the increased costs. They hired a loud-mouthed Frenchman, Raymond Loewy, to design a useless sheet metal box around their design.
The craziest part is that it was successful. People paid extra for this luxurious necessity!
The same thing goes for thermostats, TVs, cel phones and everything else. Just because the technology of LCDs or OLEDs permits a very thin form, doesn’t mean the design is any less important. In fact, I’m universally disappointed with the lack of design opportunities in these new TVs. Didn’t Apple prove to us that we don’t need everything in small shiny ABS boxes? Why are we still debating it?