Chris Wanstrath gave a great presentation at DjangoCon this week about The Real-Time Web. Since working on a web-based IRC client (yay Leafy!) with Chris and Alex Gaynor, I will whole-heartedly agree that the interesting part of The Real-Time Web is more about the browser than any backend processes.
Check out Chris' slides to get a better idea...
When I first saw the slide with the orange dude reading RSS on the toilet (around slide 12) I said to Chris,
How did you know I read my feeds on the toilet... using my iPhone... at work... at Six Apart??