I think it more in line with the enterprise developer that is thrown into a development world they don't fully understand and need to get up to speed quickly.
Yes, the point was to show you could make custom UI's utilizing the "out of the box" functionality of jQuery UI. I tried to incorporate as much of the library as I could. I used a ThemeRoller theme (ui-lightness) to show how easy it could be to maintain a consistent theme across all widgets on a page. Thanks for the comment.
We considered the Alpha 1 release feature complete. The goal now is to work on optimization of the code to make things run more smoothly. Alpha 2 fixed a number of bugs and made a number of improvements. Still much to do.
jasonkester: in jQuery 1.4.3 a lot of work was done to make jQuery more modular. So you could take the peices of the library that you want and leave out the rest (i.e. effects).
This isn't the recommendation of the jQuery Team but if you feel the library is getting too bloated you now have the option to cherry pick only the options of jQuery you'd like to use.
I seem to only be able to replicate this on the 3rd Gen iPads.