I think that they will not do any further significant development on the ribbon. MS' Office team have moved on, we now have Office 365, Excel Services, self-service BI (PowerPivot) and integration with Denali and SharePoint. They are taking Office in another direction, and this requires their effort at a time where the economy means that they (MS) have lost a lot of people. When I say Office, I mean Excel for sure, I am not so clear what they have in mind for Word and/or Access (and I don't care what they have in mind for PowerPoint). From where I sit, Word seems to drive the Office team's thinking, which is odd seeing as Excel and Access are far more 'innovative' products. In 2007 I thought that Access looked doomed, come 2010 and it got a whole new lie.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this statement ... because, fundamentally, if the ribbon isn't pretty-- then it doesn't have anything going for it. As a developer, I feel it has little going for it, but that is yesterday's argument, it is here, other companies have adopted it (even though it rarely adds to their product (Snagit, Help & Manual, ...), so we just need to work with it as best we can. To be honest, I have found other things in 2007/2010 far more exasperating than the ribbon (conditional formatting, NameManager, etc.). I have had lots of fun playing with ribbon, notwithstanding that I think it is a poor paradigm and a poor implementation.
