Wei Dai published his work originally on crypto-currency in 1998 (in fact some suspected that Wei Dai is Satoshi). Moreover Szabo was mirroring lots of the same thoughts with his bitgold proposals.
From an economic perspective, the Austrian school has been gaining more and more creditability as it becomes increasingly clear that monopolistic control of currency is unworkable in the long-term.
Therefore, there was nothing specifically revolutionary about it. It was really just one of those things that it was just waiting for someone to come tie these things together into a coherent project (I'm not at all minimizing the work satoshi did).
This all does beg the larger question; Who is Satoshi and why would he disappear. Personally, I think it was a nom-de-plume of several people who intelligently made the decision to 'disappear' (even though they may still be active on the project using different names). Leaderless projects are very difficult for the various state monopolies to fight.