It's a very real form of user interface. See the Persona Project at Microsoft Research and various projects at the MIT Media Lab for relatively recent (i.e. within the last few years) examples of a line of user interface development going back decades.
We might presume that it won't end here, and that it will progress. When there's TNG style hologram technology, we should expect it to be used. What I find hard to believe is that other areas will be so far behind. Why not go further, and have part of the ships crew be hologram based? No doubt this is just on the TNG/DS9 horizon. This may be the trap that the Startrek people have dug for themselves. Eventually, they'll have to create a series entirely populated byhologram characters, and it'll be the flesh and blood characters who appear in special non-hologram episodes.
"Bottle in a Ship"? Hmm. I expect to see such an episode totally CGI based. After all, why would holograms all wish to be limited by the abilities of humans? Imagine a hologram captain with an ego the size of Kirk's! Big trouble.
Of course, Scot Adams has some much funnier things to say about all this, in "The Dilbert Future". I wrote the above long before reading this book.
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