"Discover" is made of "dis-cover", meaning "remove the things covering the other thing." The "inter" in "interaction" implies movement between objects in a physical space. To "take advantage" evokes physically grasping something.
Perhaps this is more philosophical than you wanted, but I doubt we'll be leaving behind physical metaphors anytime soon.
I agree some of the actual system specific icons and metaphors are outdated and junk, but I guess I'm in the camp that thinks these basic metaphors are actually useful in the education of computer interface / mechanisms.
They might have been metaphors once, now they are idioms.
The people who "have never known a world without computers" have also never known a world where there weren't filesystem folders and files.