I can honestly say that I definitely still use the widgets. Some of my favorites are the iTunes widget (I hate having the entire iTunes app open), a Ruby documentation widget, and of course I absolutely love the Peal Lyrics widget (I'm always checking it to find out the lyrics to a song I'm currently playing).

Nevertheless, I am still searching for that one widget I can't live without, or if nothing else, it would be nice if Apple could find a way to reduce the time it takes for the widgets to start up. That's really annoying and quite often it is enough of an incentive for me to use another application rather than use Dashboard.

Bottom line--give me a faster startup time and one widget that I can't live without, and I'll never use anything else.