I wouldn't call it a step back. That sounds rather pessimistic. It looks like an experiment, like many great things that come out of Microsoft's research.

The Computer Vision field has certainly gotten far with head-tracking and object recognition.

With a bunch of relatively simple code, you can have a piece of software that tracks your jaw and blinking gestures with a cheap webcam and run whatever macros you choose.

I'm not sure about eyeball following, it depends on the camera's resolution and how much you train the program.

I have myself experimented with head-tracking to replace mouse-look in FPS games. It is very fun to try, save for an eventual headache in Quake 3's Q3DM17 :)

Now, these kinds of experiments are not for the average consumer, but they have been simplified so much over the last few years that the amount of excuses for not trying it out is decreasing.