This is probably a configuration problem in upper layers, but with supermount, my removable media is always "mounted" and thus always visible as an icon on my Gnome desktop, as opposed to only appearing when actual media is in the drive. I put up with it because it's the only thing I've found that can deal with floppy drives in a reasonable manner (i.e. no manual unmounting, eject whenever the led's off).

Is there a decent overview of how the latest hotplug, Gnome, KDE, etc. handle, or will handle in the future, removable media? I suspect I have many misconceptions about the concept as a whole.

This fusexmp sounds interesting. The ability to swap drives around while files remain "open" is intriguing. As hinted at in the article, this opens some potential usability problems (likely solvable though). I'm trying to imagine how this would affect a fictional system not so ingrained with the notion of applications or the saving of files.