What is Google Wave? SOLVED!

Sometimes I am kinda slow and it takes me a while to catch on, and sometimes others don't make it any easier in their effort to help me understand. Google Wave is one of those things that was the moral equivalent of a flash-bang grenade when it comes to grokking its very essence. Given the grandiose pronouncements by its proponents, like "its gonna replace email", I thought it important to cut through the fog and figure out just what it was and why it was allegedly important. As I researched it, I found pretty much nothing but regurgitated text from the initial info that caused the fog in the first place. I kind of nibbled around the edge of understanding until I stumbled upon a great use case for Wave. Suddenly the mental tetris game of understanding accelerated until I was able to synthesize a simple explanation that others might understand. Here goes...

"Google Wave is IRC, with server side logs, as if it was invented now by Web 2.0 people with modern technology."

Server side logs are important, versus old school IRC, in that you can catch up on threads, even if you don't have the client running.

Hopefully this explains Google Wave a bit for people as bewildered as I was.