Actually, I did a modified version of this a few months back before I picked up a Macbook. The real reason I was interested was because of the functionality the dock offered--I was able to put all my ex-"quick launch" icons into a separate area, thereby freeing up a huge amount of space on my taskbar. This allowed many more windows to be open before the horrible autostacking feature came into play.

I agree with what you're saying about it not really being anything like OS X. However, there are still some (relatively minor) usability enhancements you can gain from this type of modification, which in some cases make it well worth the few megs of ram required to run the fake dock program.