I (and a lot of other laptop users) would find inclusion of the software suspend kernel patches very useful. Pavel Machek maintains the latest versions, and now ext3 is supported....
Unfortionatly swsuspend is far from production ready (it still eats filesystems etc etc).... once it's more stable it's an obvious candidate for inclusion, however I fear that will not be in the 2.4 kernel timescale... more like 2.6