Unfortunately a lot of the public discussion of studies related to intelligent design has been pretty shallow, or as you noted "lame".
Actually there is quite a bit to be learned by thinking about the questions raised by an effort to determine if something you observe was created by an "intelligent" process. Just defining what that means is a challenge, and it is central to efforts like the SETI project.
We have lots of intelligently designed organisms around us today - cows, corn, fruit trees, etc. I doubt even the most stringent Darwinians would claim that Monsanto bio-engineered corn was a result of natural selection. So an interesting question is how do you determine if an organism was designed? How can you tell if the apple tree in the woods was created by breeding 100 years ago?
Good point. I'm currently reading the works by William Dembski, which focus on desing inference.