Some of the loaders I've seen (Coke's sites in particular, in my experience) have ridiculous system requirements to appear smooth. Add in that they're using Flash, which pretty much allows you to do anything... and they're examples of what the removal of limitations has spurred. Google's pacman is a good example of creativity within limitations, given that it's a bunch of divs and even works on IE6, instead of something more capable like <canvas>.

Not that I'm denying limitations spur creativity. There are some awesome things in the Demoscene, and older hardware, and more power can often result in less focus.

The Pacman loading bar [1] is actually very interesting. I think it’s just a static image – doomed to be stuck at 60% forever. Since load times are low that doesn’t really matter. It’s instantly recognized for what it is and that might be all that’s needed (and it fits the theme better than those newfangled spinning indicators).

[1] Empty your cache (if you visited before), load and quickly click “Insert Coin”, you might see it for a fraction of a second: http://google.com/pacman