I absolutely love how 37Signals blog about how they built a particular feature. They give a real walk-through of the thought processes that were involved. The most recent example is the project switcher for base camp. This is a simple feature in essense, but it got a lot of love.

This brings me to another realisation: quality features need quality time. Time to think, time to experiment, time to communicate, time to polish. Nomatter how brilliant you are, you can rarely deliver excellence without investing quality time.