story
Well, that's not really quite the background to call the dojo widgets useless. They are a really useful set of _programmable_ widgets.
Aye, they _might_ appear to be useless to developers used to cut & paste, but if you delve a little deeper you will discover a world of useful UI widgets that can fulfill most of your needs for rich web applications.
If your needs aren't fulfilled with the provided widgets you can always make your own or modify the existing ones with the tools provided, that I must say are great at it.