There's certainly historically been a great deal of UI experimentation out there, but in the past, it's been limited in context: entirely new UI paradigms, as I

There's certainly historically been a great deal of UI experimentation out there, but in the past, it's been limited in context: entirely new UI paradigms, as I remember, we're often tested out in entirely new products designed around the UI concept - which often succeeded or failed in the market due to the UI's influence - or we're gradually fleshed out as R&D projects over long periods of time. But anything more than incremental UI paradigms used to have to prove themselves before they ended up as the default UI of well-established software products' shipping releases. It just seems like there's a tendency for new versions of existing products to have in their release notes something along the lines of "added: entirely new grounds-up UI design, based on experimental concepts, that bears little resemblance to previous UI". E.g. Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, Windows 8; ironically, Apple currently offers the most conservative and predictable desktop UI among currently-shipping OSes. This doesn't really relate to the state-vs.-action question directly, except that I thing both may be related to a current tendency to emphasize visual aesthetics over functional consistency.