SAMIE is one of those projects that makes me want to think of an excuse to use the software. The developers (ingeniously) offer a set of perl bindings for IE. If you think about it, this is much more useful than most of the QA http system testing tools out there, if nothing else for the power of the language it's written in. It gives you the right primitives for load testing, functional testing or writing a screen scraper :-). Things like Silk, or OpenSTA give you some cranky stripped down language that's nearly impossible to use and never works right.
I think what would turn this into a true Silk killer would be:
Do the same thing with Java bindings. There is nothing that would stop us from exporting a COM control via JNI, just like these guys did with the native perl interfaces. Having a more grown-up and familiar language interface would totally rock.
Build up a set of tools in the spirit of JUnitPerf that would let you automate load testing and performance valiation, preferrably with easy hooks to a graphical push-button interface for junior QA testers.
I've had some QA people tell me that SAMIE was unacceptable because it only runs on Windows, but I think that misses the point by a mile: SAMIE gives you the real browser that your REAL users use on the same platform, and lets you test FOR REAL with it. IMHO, that's what QA is all about.