Are VB's XML Literals an XSLT killer?

The VB Team have released the first in a series of XML Cookbook recipes. This one covers how you can use VB's new XML literal support in Visual Studio 2008 to replace the W3C's rather cumbersome XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) language with much simpler VB code.

“To sum things up, we’ve seen how Visual Basic, XML Literals and LINQ can be used in place of the <xsl:copy-of>, <xsl:for-each>, <xsl:template>, <xsl:if>, <xsl:value-of>, and <xsl:attribute> elements as well as using XML Axis Properties in place of XPath to create a powerful, yet simple tool for XML transformations.”

As someone who once developed a web site completely using Java servlets spitting out XML data using XSLT files to transform that into web pages, I've got to say that anything that gets us away from XSLT is a good thing. The way you can use LINQ to query the XML data is inspired, and this has the potential to make VB the language of choice for developers needing to glue together SOA.