Well, you can transform up from a bike dynamo and then light neons as well, but you'll not achieve it the other way round - transforming down a Wimshurst There must be a trick to do that, as the Testatika worked too, but we don't know it. So the electromagnetic power generation still rules, as it's more universal for usage.

That's because all the infrastructure and all the devices we use these days are geared toward low voltage high current power systems. I agree that electromagnetic power generation rules, for a number of reasons. But consider this: Electrostatic, high voltage low current systems, can be built without actual drawn wires, without chemical batteries, without magnets, without complicated components like capacitors or transformers. IOW, it is very _low_ technology dependent. In principle, electrostatic machines could have provided mechanical power and lighting, even thousands of years ago, without any sophisticated machining or manufacturing technology.

The high voltages at low currents from ESmachines can be stored in HV capacitors connected in series. Then these caps can be functionally connected in parallel and discharged that way, at lower voltages and higher currents. Think "marx bank" in reverse.

The Testatika machines are not electrostatic machines. That's a red herring. Even Baumann's description of one disk as "cloud" and the other as "earth" gets it wrong: machines like Wimshurst and Bonetti separate charges by Left and Right Halves... both disks are charged the same way, with one lateral half being "cloud" and the other half being "earth".

Actually, when you think about it, most of our present electrical power goes through an "electrostatic" phase during transmission: very high voltage transmission lines operating at hundreds of kV and relatively low currents bring the power from the generating plants to local substations, where it is "down-converted" by multi-stages of transformers, very heavy and expensive.

but; it's a matter of energy per second... how much power can it impart... I₁E₁=I₂E₂

No dispute there, except that energy is the important quantity not Power. Power is energy, dissipated over a time. You can have short bursts of high power or longer supplies of less power, all for the same energy. So your normal "ES" discharge is a short, highpower burst, since the voltage is very high even though the current is small. So you take the storage cap stack and "rewire" it from series HV/low current to parallel LV/high current. You are discharging the same energy in both cases; the first case might not be usable even though it is "high power" since it is so short. The second case, same energy discharged over longer time periods, is low voltage, high current and goes on for longer times. Same energy, captured as ES high voltage, but discharged at lower voltage higher current, usable in our present devices using wires and magnets.

Last interesting video of lidmotor:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l_VYGAJP8g&list=UU9jbwyyAum79LXTNCgHeuFg&feature=c4-overview
The heat(?) finger on negative side move the close electrostatic motor.
I think that is the heat of but I'm not sure.

Since I can't find the answer to my question as to how electrostatic-charges dissipate, 
    that is,  whether a normal smooth surface looses it's electrostatic-charge into the air over time,  or whether it can only transmit that charge to another object,
I can't work out the answer to the question below .

   ( There are several different types of electrostatic-motors  )

   Electrostatic-Motor In A Vacuum
       If you placed a suitable type of  electrostatic-motor( for this vaccum question ) into the highest vacuum that can be achieved :

    -  Would the motor run for a longer time,  than in a non-vacuum,   before dissipating all of it's charge  ?

    -  I assume that putting it into a vacuum,  could not turn it into a perpetual-motion device

    -  Each time a  moving-charged-component  of the motor( in the vacuum ) discharges some of it's charge to a stator in the motor,  would it visually look like one of those plasma-globes  ?

    -  Could some additional wiring( and maybe electronics ) turn it into a  self-running  perpetual-motion device,   ?