From the blogging search after the Smackdown, I've found the Code Ronin to have blogged about it, and the following quotes made me trigger:

Out of those presented, the only ones I can see us migrating to are JSF, Tapestry, and Shale. Why not Wicket and WebWork? Well, while Wicket sounds delightful, it sounds really different, and as for WebWork, I have to agree with Craig.

Glad to hear that Wicket sounds delightful, but considering your next statement on JSF:

Using JSF will be easy. The biggest con is that the tags it presents are VERY GUI oriented, designed to replace HTML in the JSPs. That's great for developers, but not so great for the web integrators at my workplace who like to code their own HTML and JavaScript, thank you very much. Still, my boss spoke of visual beans two years back, and that's what JSF is.

I REALLY ENCOURAGE you to take an interest in Wicket as we allow the web designers to design and developers develop nearly independently. Wicket has a pure HTML nature fulfilling your requirement to allow webdesigners to design the pages.

I invite you to check it out and see whether you like it. It is too early to dismiss it based on 'it sounds really different'. I attended several JSF sessions on JavaOne, sat through both 'Tapestry in Action' and 'WebWork' presentations, and I dare to say: Wicket is far more easy to grok than the other component based frameworks, and I might add: the current myriad of MVC frameworks.