It reminds me of the wonderful fun days of Java 1.2 - anybody remember how proud Sun was of how everything derived from object so you could use the untyped containers for everything?
The main difference with casting to Object is that you can use type switches or safe casts which return an additional success boolean, to restore type safety quickly after taking the item out of its container. Yes, you can type-test in Java before you type-cast, but it isn't idiomatic, and it isn't syntax.
