I know very little about electronics design, so I always find it amazing that they keep managing to double PCIe throughput over and over. Its also probably the longest lived expansion bus at the moment.
802.3dj is maybe finishing up soon and has 200gbps lanes. Which is more or less about what pci-e 8.x is supposed to be. The table in the article sums both directions of a lane, which leads to confusion. People want faster ethernet in fewer lanes, so no doubt a 400gbps per lane standard will be starting up soon for pci-e to leverage as pci-e 9.
> not in a format I would normally call Ethernet
Why, because it doesn't use ether, or vampire taps?
Ethernet works over many media, and that's been pretty consistent throughout its life. It started from or at least was inspired by AlohaNet a wireless system, then you had thick and thin coax, then twisted pair and fiber, now twinax and board level interfaces are common, too.