To me, the language is interesting because it could be used for other things...or to put it a different way interactive fiction seems a useful design abstraction for other real world tasks.
What would it mean to wire inform up to arbitrary hardware as a primary user interface?
Infocom themselves tried such a thing many years ago - IIRC it was a db interface language called Cornerstone. Somewhat obviously, not a great success.
Wouldn't that have been with a different language? Inform 7 is a vastly different language from Inform 1-6 (which were relatively Algol-like), and only came out in 2006.
What would it mean to wire inform up to arbitrary hardware as a primary user interface?