I disabled it cause my firefox was consistently at 70% CPU usage while it was running. Now that's a fail....
I always though Cuil was a bad idea. Who cares if you index 10x more than google, it's all crap I don't want to find anyway.
The idea of changing how we interact with Web content is the future of Web search. That's a given. Google has been experimenting with new ways for a while now (the latest being the Knowledge Graph
http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html), they've also done the page preview thing.
The Web is just waiting for someone to come up with something really useful in terms of (re)organizing web content on demand. I'm not saying axis will be it, but it's an interesting idea. I have my own ideas too, who knows, maybe I'll come up with the billion dollar idea (that google buys from me, then retirement at 35, sounds good okthx.)