(FORTUNE Magazine) – In hindsight, the most astonishing aspect of Microsoft's recent purchase of Intuit, the upstart maker of the popular Quicken line of personal finance PC software, isn't the rich, $1.5 billion price -- a 50% premium over Intuit's market value; nor that the deal makes Bill Gates kingpin of yet another software genre; nor even that it puts America's richest entrepreneur one step away from becoming America's richest banker. No, the real wonder is that it didn't happen sooner.

Gates finally has the software to go with a vision of the future he's been touting for years -- one that puts electronic commerce at the core of personal computing and the coming information superhighway. He even thinks that we will someday carry a "Wallet PC." His company now believes it can provide the vital link in what executive VP Mike Maples calls "a whole new value chain" in which customers interact via modem with banks, brokerages, insurance companies, pension funds, and the like. Six million Quicken users already pay bills, manage credit cards, write checks, and handle their taxes electronically. That's 5.2 million more people than use Microsoft's Money software, which is one reason Gates gave up on the product and virtually donated it to competitor Novell. (For more on the competing products, see Personal Investing.) Says Maples, in a rare instance of Microsoftian modesty: "We finally had to ask ourselves: Do we have the time to build a product and market on our own, or is the world moving too fast for us?" Intuit founder Scott Cook is understandably "thrilled'' that his stake will net him Microsoft stock worth at least $280 million. He'll stay on as Gates' czar of electronic commerce, with far greater resources to connect Quicken with banks and merchants around the world. Will Gates buy his way into more businesses? The Microsoft empire, after all, is founded on his 1980 purchase of the DOS operating system from a Seattle hacker. Maples won't rule anything out. Says he: "We haven't reached a size that we are no longer a growth-oriented company." In other words, stay tuned.