It seems that the fitness industry has been stagnant in terms of exercise equipment for a while. In recent years, we have seen arc trainers on the scene as well as the Precor AMT (never tried it myself) and now Octane has a zero runner.
http://www.octanefitness.com/home/products/zero-runner/

Now this is quite a turn of events but my dog injured her knee prior to summer and my skinny/fit husband used to run with the dogs. He also had some of his own aches and pains for running so he hasn't been running much in the last 6 months. Our elliptical computer also broke and the cost of repair (it is an older model) wasn't cheap so we got rid of it. My husband noticed his pants were a little tighter than he liked so I told him we could go look at smaller ellipticals (our old one was 7 feet long? a bit longer than I liked). Anyway, a web search brought me to the zero runner. It has the smallest footprint I've seen in an elliptical like machine. I called around local stores to find one that had a floor model to test. And off we went.

The sales person warned us that it had a learning curve and my normal confident self was like 'no problem'. I got on and immediate thought was 'what the **** is this'. Anyway, I started gazelling it as my husband said and then started a running motion. I could feel my hamstrings and calves and quads. My husband tried it and liked it as well. We got onto the ellipticals immediately after and the difference was incredible. Ellipticals felt... odd in comparison. So we decided to order it.

Anyway, due to the sale (yay!) and new year crowd, we have 2 weeks before it is delivered. I'll update this thread after we get it.