However, there are some cool things you can do with the API. You can retrieve and update all your objects, apex code, triggers, visualforce, static resources, etc via the API. Meaning you can build tools that make deployments easy. You could even build an application to take snapshots of all your Metadata on a Nightly Basis for backing up and creating versions of objects. There are all sorts of cool stuff you can do!
For example, my simple java application reads a local MySQL database schema information and uploads it to Force.com. Here's a screenshot of the beta or work in progress if you will:
You can also take a look at this demo on YouTube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTQcayubCEA&context=C3378280ADOEgsToPDskKXJUZxact1OiFZosSoQ_52
Hopefully I'll get this sucker finished up soon. Once I do I'll post the code to GitHub along with a follow up article about it about the technical details. But if you're reading this, your probably interested in the API and what you can do. And really the sky's the limit!
I'd like to also give a shout out to Cloud Converter from Model Metrics while I'm talking about this. This application has been around a while and is available on the App Exchange, and its great for building data dictionaries for clients. Its Open Source too, so you can take a peak of the code on Google Code. http://developer.force.com/projectpage?id=a0630000003LD3HAAW
