Adam Darowski has an excellent piece on URLs as user interface at his blog, Traces of Inspiration.
I was just thinking about this yesterday when I was looking at Flickr with a “non-power-user” friend, trying to find an old picture in someone’s photostream. I watched them go from page to page, clicking 3 ahead, as it’s the most Flickr will let you skip from the middle of a big stream. When I told them they could type any page number they wanted (up to the last page, of course, whose number is displayed on every page) into the address bar to skip by larger chunks, they took to it right away.
http://flickr.com/photos/username/page10
^^
Good URL design is useful for lots of people, not just geeks power-users.