I agree. The next generation of spreadsheets, will be a more powerful spreadsheet. The ease of use and widespread familiarity with spreadsheets are going to make them very difficult to ever displace.

That said, airtable does look pretty cool. As someone terminally addicted to Excel, and looking at Microsoft's recent responsiveness to market dynamics, it makes me wonder whether if this was a major market opportunity, they could create a special "realtional DB tab" in excel and capture 90% of the functionality. Interesting to watch.