Is it me, or do you too get the impression that "the usual suspects" have misread pretotyping as prototyping?

The most interesting thing for me about this idea, (with its awful sobriquet), is that it is nothing new.

My second attempt at a career was to do an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering with a car manufacturer, with a view to becoming a draftsman. Which after 5 years, I finally made it into the drawing office for the last 13 weeks. At which point I kicked it into touch; I hated it. (Though the death of my father had some part to play also.) During the apprenticeship I got to spend time in pretty much every dept. from the accounts office to waste management. My favorite dept. was the styling and design centre where I discovered I had something of a flair for sculpting.

Every year, the dept. produced dozens of quarter scale clay models of proposed designs; from which some candidates where chosen to go on to be rendered full sized.

Similarly, they would repad existing seats to change their shape and cover them with plain white calico covers which would then be hand painted to give substance to designer's ideas.

In addition, many of the Concept cars at the major motor shows each year are non-running mock-ups to test feasibility and opinion.

Coming back to software, I can see some merit in the idea of pretotyping the (graphical) user interfaces of programs and web applications; but -- unlike the wooden mock-up of the Palm Pilot -- I think that the distinction between a pretotype and a minimal prototype is essentially negligible.