Where are the widgets?

Apparently something that Gnome doesn’t do well is desktop widgets. Yahoo has some pretty swanky ones for Windows, Apple has some extremely cool ones for Mac OSX but where are the Linux ones?

I do have something called gDesklets (I include the link but it’s pretty futile because the site is so full of errors that it’s useless). They have some alright little desklets that you can customise in colour to suit your background, that’s about all you can do really. I haven’t been able to get any of the weather ones to actually retrieve any weather data and the calendar ones only show you the dates, from what I can see they can’t actually integrate with anything to show you your appointments.

What I really want is a desktop calendar that can see my Google Calendar appointments, a weather widget would be a bonus. In my travels I’ve seen Gnome Calendar, which is accessible from the desktop, which integrates with Evolution, Evolution can in turn integrate with Google Calendar. That’d might be fine if I was using Evolution as my mail client but I’m not, I’m using Thunderbird. It’s not that I’m particularly attached to Thunderbird, it just seems like too much hassle to change all my accounts over (which doesn’t happen automatically) for use of the calendar which isn’t necessarily quite what I want.
I also came across Wuja. It might have been nice but I couldn’t get it to run.
I thought about writing my own desklet but I couldn’t find enough information on how to do so (probably because the skanky gDesklets site is broken).
Why can’t someone just make something like this for Linux. Isn’t it beautiful? I wouldn’t even need it to be that pretty, I just want a convenient calendar viewer. I’d attempt to port this one over but I don’t know the language gDesklets uses, I wouldn’t know where to start. Anyone want to do it for me?