This may be more of a customization than you are thinking about including in the final WP Framework -- but for my themes, I like to have Tweetbacks & Pings filtered out of Comments in the Responses area.
Using the Tweetbacks plugin & recommendations for editing comments.php from this post: http://sivel.net/2008/10/wp-27-comment-separation/ I added a few lines so that TweetBacks can be viewed (if the plugin is installed & active) and pings would be separated from comments and also changed the comments_template() call in single.php to : <?php comments_template('',true); ?>
If this is something other people are interested (including you, Ptah), let me know and I'll share how I did it.