I always wondered why Wave was not intergrested with Usenet as could of brought usenet into the modern World interface/interaction wise. Beyond that it reminded me of many Web 2.0 Nortel project, great technicaly but pushing the resource boundaries of the time. Hence had its sluggish moments, as in on a fat pipe was great, but consumer pipes was meh.
Google has Google Groups which interfaces with usenet. Also, the nature of "waves" doesn't fit with threaded communication model of usenet. It can be made to work, but you'd need many waves/wavelets to accomplish that, and going back and editing previous stuffs would create a confusing set of messages on Usenet. Would you post those to usenet? Post it by replying with a diff? It'd require a very different model. Far easier to integrate standard web forums with usenet (which I, personally, think would be awesome) than what Wave had. It was really designed around a collaborative document model. Would've been awesome if the invite system hadn't been so clunky, and the year delay between announcement and when my friends finally got access just killed any momentum at the time (for me).
Still, it moves on.