Animated? This I've got to see...

Hmm. I'm doubting the "without hardware accelleration" comment here.

From Enlightenments's DR17 page:

"...and use OpenGL to accelerate rendering"

It does seem to do that without relying on xorg, which is excellent news.

I'm going to have to get my hands on this pretty soon to test it out

I recall back in the day that you could use "Software rending" and "Hardware rendering" for games. They'd use the same API (eg OpenGL or DirectX), and if your machine had a video card with the correct drivers, it could help out with that rendering.

I guess what I'm saying is that even if OpenGL is being used, it may not be requisite.

To take your quote in context:

It does a lot of the grunt work of display, and is portable beyond X. It even runs in the framebuffer directly without needing X, under Trolltech's Qtopia, on DirectFB, can render into a memory buffer, and use OpenGL to accelerate rendering.

What we're talking about here is the flexibility of Evas, the "display canvas".