I get the impression he simply doesn't know what each program is about (i.e. what makes them in particular interesting) for a bunch of them, and for some the video is simply too rushed.
Figaro's password manager: Use it not only to track your passwords, but generate them! The safest passwords are ones with no connection to anything else, and there's a password generator in FPM. Since you only need to remember your master password, this allows you to use a strong password all over. Of course, that's all basic functionality of a password manager, and a major feature for them could be integration (like KDE's wallet or gnome's keyring).
Gwaei: Kanjipad entry, radical lookup, stroke order display.. this actually allows me (who can't write kanji, hanzi, katakana or hiragana) to look characters up. Impressive, and thank you for the tip, mcobit! Without this, the video just comes off as a really slow dictionary (I've used lookup and xjdic before, which allow romaji entry, and fiddled with
hanzim which could do hanzi searches by radicals).
Squeeze,
Xarchiver: Eh, archive GUIs. I've used file-roller in the past, but personally mostly stick to command line. Squeeze is native to xfce so may use its VFS.
Xournal: pen-focused note taking; remarkable features include PDF annotation (duplicating the "document viewer" evince's functionality a bit) and shape recognition (draw a circle, get an actual circle). Of course you can also enter text, which I've used to fill in PDF forms.
Gedit: Beyond the basic text editing (including incremental search) it has a plugin system, which can extend it for many uses. Judging by the file /usr/lib/gedit-2/plugin-loaders/libpythonloader.so those plugins can be scripts as well.
GoldenDict: Yep, another dictionary tool. Beyond the support for indexed on- and offline dictionaries, it does transliteration and morphology. Grouping dictionaries gives easy ways to switch based on things like source language and whether you're online.
Comix: Comic viewer, opens bitmap images in folders or archives. I use it all the time. It features rotation, scrolling direction switch for right to left, and double page view with automatic detection of wide (double page) images. I only wonder where the interpolation setting for upscaling went, but this will matter less on the Pandora.
"Document Viewer" seems to be
evince. It's the one PDF viewer I know of to hide its own name like that. It does load a bunch of other formats too (posctscript, djvu, dvi, single image).
Dia's feature of connection points is mentioned, but not shown. Presumably because the targets are a bit hard to hit.
mtPaint: There's your paintbrush program - only, of course, a lot better. It can handle proper transparency, do basic color manipulations, precise pixel art, layers and animations.
Ristretto is the xfce basic picture viewer. It can show a whole folder of pictures, rotate and zoom, but not a whole lot else.
That fractal generator could really use some DSP help (whether from the DSP or GPU - perhaps even both). I'd normally use
XaoS for browsing fractals.
Fotoxx is a photo management program; handle your collections, do slide shows, batch resize, colour adjustment and so on.
Pencil is a classical animation tool. I gather this could be used to produce things like
Simon's cat animations.
Trackers are a type of musical sequencer that originated from the Amiga.
MilkyTracker and
Schism Tracker are two of the more modern ones, inspired by the DOS programs Fasttracker II and Impulse Tracker respectively, but portable and free.