I think there's a lot more progress to be made in the e-commerce checkout process in general. It takes far too much time and effort to buy things online, turning away impulse buyers.
It seems like Amazon's "express checkout pay phrase" feature is focused on impulse buys, at sites other than Amazon. It's really the next, more secure step, after one-click, for enabling easy payments on sites other than Amazon.
Too bad the idea of amazon's implementation of payphrase kind of feels goofy.
What would be nice, is if the credit card companies could save your "default" shipping preferences. Then, unless you wanted to ship somewhere else, online checkout would only need to ask for your CC number... almost as easy as a retail transaction.
I've never understood the appeal of embedded labels ("email" inside the email input field instead of next to it). In general it doesn't look any better, and the space saving is minimal. It's also an accessibility nightmare, and as the article mentions, quite confusing once you've already focused the input field.