Ruby on Rails's ActiveRecord does this database->form mapping amazingly well. We should take some of their concepts into Drupal, and I therefor encourage everyone to do a 20 minute quickstart in RoR development. Just to get the feeling of how Drupal /could be/ in this database mapping smartness! http://ar.rubyonrails.com/docs #tutorials
schemeql (schematics.sf.net) goes one further - you forget the db (nearly) completely. You just use the language (php) to define your structures and it is automagially converted into an appropriate db call(s). Combined with the "other" half - a decent serialisation of the data into xhtml, via templates or whatever and you have everything you'll ever need. But is it really appropriate? Are we grown up enough?