mctrivia: I've been thinking about that a year ago. But:
1) Not all browsers support Ajax and the noscript solution would only make the page code longer.
2) If someone updates only a part of the page (e.g. game board section) and does it continuously for, say, an hour, he would not be aware of other important information like the number of new messages etc.
3) JavaScript based code is much more error prone than a simple HTML, so it would take more time to make it stable. Not to mention other server side changes which are necessary to make it work anyway.