Why the sudden interest in org-mode?

In the past few months, I've heard of a lot of people switching to emacs or showing interest in using org-mode, even if they haven't otherwise picked even pretty basic emacs features. Some are forum users, and some are in real life.

Nothing wrong with that, of course -- it may be that there's a big need for org-mode's features. But I have to admit, it's left me a bit bewildered as to how org-mode got all this press.

I only use a portion of org-mode's features, but it seems to me mostly to be a "better text format". It adds the ability to embed some traditionally non-text-file features -- tables, auto-executing code, outlines, etc -- to text files. I like that, and I've been writing .org files instead of .txt files recently. However, it seems like the sort of thing that would be on par with integrating gnus with bbdb or something. Fine as features go, but not the sort of thing that I'd normally expect most new emacs users to be doing off-the-bat or to be specifically-interested in emacs for. More of interest to people who are trying to emacsify everything they do.

It could be that there's a big unmet demand for PIM-like features in Unix software, but I haven't seen a whole lot of people talking about, say, ical/diary/gnus support.

Have there been famous people talking about org-mode being game-changing to the software world or something recently? What is driving the sudden interest?