i too miss the tabbed windows from OS9, they were very useful. Ever since those good old days i have been a big fan of DragThing and still use it with no Leopard problems so far.

For the uninitiated DragThing is a flexible, flexible launcher/dock with the ability to hide itself and display different tabs for all of your stuff, and you can have as many different docks as you want and each can have its own style and behavior. It is ridiculously customizable. It can do everything described in this thread so far except for fan out the icons.

Between that and Quicksilver and Apple's dock, i've got plenty of redundant access, but they are all hiding off the edges of my screen, save for a set of tabs divvying up my work apps which runs vertically along the left of my monitor. Lots of actionable icons, no eyesores.