I have seen some evidence in some email traffic that the glibc ld.so supports $ORIGIN in --run-path strings. I can't find any documentation that would address this one way or the other -- though the ld.so man page would be a logical spot. If, indeed, ld.so supports $ORIGIN (and others), I respectfully submit that some man page should talk about it.
rpm -qf /usr/share/man/man8/ld.so.8.gz man-pages-1.60-4
the next update to 2.1 should include the newer version of man-pages which includes ld, which mentions $ORIGIN