We most likely don't want to do this. In the longer term, migrating away from gconf would be a good thing. dconf provides similar benefits (notification of changes etc) with a much, much better read performance, which is why I was careful to remove gconf-specific behavior from MGConfItem to allow us to switch the backend mostly seamlessly to UI code later on.

If you can figure out a way to hide this in MGConfItem (or somewhere near it, so the switching is easier) and make sure that we can do it with dconf, then I'd be happy to see it in. The API is useful.