Eric Rucker is blogging about Access 12. His post today discussed changes to the underlying engine to provide "full schema compatibility with Windows SharePoint Services lists." A benefit of this change: "This allows us to take SharePoint list data offline and to provide rich-client UI for SharePoint using Access."

I see this as quite a big deal. Consider the number of Access developers compared to the number of InfoPath developers. Consider the number of installed Access licenses compared to the number of InfoPath licenses. I would not be surprised if this dramaticlly slows the acceptance of InfoPath.