VFS: Lennart, what you want is GVFS, which is being developed right now by alexl, has dropped the POSIX abstraction approach and it’s surely more portable than FUSE. And, most of all, has a sane API (for a change). For “sane API” I mean that I almost cried tears of joy when I saw the file monitoring interface - and I wasn’t the only one.
Ubuntu: so, it seems that Dell signed on with Canonical to provide Ubuntu on their desktops and laptops. Good for the community, GNOME, Linux and, obviously, good for Canonical. Mark Shuttleworth will be rich (again), and without even having to resort to the patent on the hand-cranked XML parser.