Web Components and Bottom-Up Design - Or, how I may have been missing the point

I've been having a hard time getting excited about Web Components. I mean, I'm pretty sure I get why they're useful and I expect to be using them a lot in the future. It's just that I haven't been able to see Web Components as the "tectonic shift" people make them out to be.

One reason for this lack of excitement might be that Web Components don't really enable me to build new kinds of things in the way that, say, WebGL or Device APIs do. Instead, Web Components enable me to do the kinds of th...