Probably you're ack'ing our work on desktop environment task, a subset of the work in the tasksel package. Everybody else can benefit of this just selecting after base installation that they want the desktop environment! I'm directly involved on this and added update-manager and other stuff there. Feedback is welcome. :)

If you're using 'testing' you can do aptitude update && aptitude install desktop gnome-desktop . Enjoy! More documentation to come with a new desktop related web page soon.