a) it has a "Layout" menuitem which brings up an awesome empty window. b) it has some plugin management gui, but apparently no plugins. I do not know what need there is for plugins in a keyboard indicator anyway.
These issues have been discussed at the Keyboard discussion, irc log at http://wiki.freedesktop.org/wiki/KeyboardInputDiscussion a) Layout should show the current layout (a keyboard with the characters on the keys). If it does not work, it should be a configuration issue in Fedora b) Apparently, the Plugins option should be relegated in the dialog box, in a tab and not be so visible. In the plugins one can enable functionality such as using flags to display the current layout. Those plugins are available at gswitchit.sf.net I think Sergey mentioned he is inclined to move Plugins to a less visible location. The big issue is (a) however. :)
unfortunately, a) was not fixed by moving to xkeyboard-config, so we need to investigate. Regarding the flags, we need to patch the plugin stuff out, since we don't ship them anyway.
so the layout not being shown is due to XkbGetKeyboard returning NULL.
This sounds like a duplicate of bug #196561, which was an Xkb regression and is now fixed upstream and in xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.1.1-14.fc6.i386.rpm.
the layout-not-shown part, yes. Keeping this bug open for the kill-the-plugins part.
fixed in 2.15.90