I would agree with you 100%. They allow Google to present the cream of “vertical” search information without leaving the comfortable space of the single search box and the main results page.

One of the implications of that is that most of the data in Google Maps and Yahoo Local will remain a click away and thus unseen by most users (until alternative devices running something like Google Map Mobile become widespread).

Which only increases the importance of the local oneboxes. I am particularly interested in the “Authoritative OneBox” as it takes up so much prominent real estate. I wonder what specific factors trigger its display. I am seeing it more often on “service + city, st” type searches even in more competitive phrases. In the past I would see it mostly on phrases where there was little or no local competition.

It strikes me that if displayed too often by Google, the “Authoritative OneBox” would ultimately discourage advertising on Google in the local space as only one company would benefit.

I think the future will bring us a lot more variations of them. There are a lot of unique OneBox features that have been developed for enterprise search, also.

Understanding as much of the OneBox as possible is probably a good thing since they do usually appear in a prominent place on Google’s Web search page above Web results, which is a great place to have your page or site linked from.