That said, once you get to a certain point, the need for further abstraction disappears. Obviously, Lisp-like languages are the epitome of what I'm getting at: as soon as you have powerful macros, you can make the programming for any application trivial by defining a high-level base for it. Domain-specific languages, while typically not as powerful, are also hard to beat, since it doesn't get much easier than, "Put an image with these dimensions <here>."
My point is that jQuery is a powerful enough language (having great abstraction capabilities even if it falls short of Lisp) and HTML and CSS are great DSLs. The combination of the 3 are simply good enough to make defining an entirely new approach a game of diminishing returns.
Of course writing C is more productive than writing assembler. Is writing Cappuccino easier than using jQuery/HTML/CSS? This submission raises the possibility that it is not.