Smart Documents - The Death of Office Document Properties?

I attended Mark Bowers' session at TechEd on building Smart Documents. He introduced a tool from Vertigo software that simplifies the programming model for smart documents.

The session left me with a couple of issues:

• How does a smart document align with InfoPath?
• How will users respond to submitting data from the task pane as opposed to saving documents?
• Wouldn't defining XSD schemas for your smart documents (which is GREAT!) make Office specific document properties obsolete?

The common denominator is the movement to wards structured business documents. InfoPath and SmartDocuments deliver different angles to achieve this purpose. According to Mark Bowers InfoPath should be used for data entry intensive tasks, however InfoPath evangelists are constructing more and more complex solutions. Currently I favor smart documents over InfoPath because they all require Office 2003, but SmartDocuments enables the users to work in a familiar environment. Considering InfoPath SP1 which enables extending forms with managed code the two solutions are more or less conceptually aligned:

You manipulate structured data in a thick client supported by managed code which can perform business logic and optionally retrieve supporting data through web services.

I am concerned as to how users will respond to the "submittance" of Smart Documents. The practice of actually saving your document at a certain location is a very established for thick-client users. Using smart documents and using "submitting functionality" might be confusing.

As business documents get more and more structured and defined in XSD, I can't really see the purpose of Office specific features like Document Properties. If you define a schema for a business document, you will want to include all business critical information in that schema, and for sure Author, creation date etc. will not be left out. A smart document that will be dispatched to a ERP system will not likely approve of WordML, thus using this schema will be less and less attractive. You'll need to use them to get full Office integration features (like Sharepoint Web Properties) so probably a mapping strategy in the Smart Documents will be preferable.

UPDATE: Mark Bower have written down a couple of rules-of thumb on where to use InfoPath vs. where to use Smart Documents.