Yes I think you are right @gkanters I would defintily not expect the functionality I spoke of to be available on the next release but I think that ultimialty that is the direction in which the Elgg API developemnt stratergy should take. 

In addition I think it is important also to look at some of the more popular plugins to be incorporated into the core.  So for example tidypics is a very popular plugin but it is not distrubuted with the core release.  You have to download and install it which requires dev effort.  Incorpoating functionality into the core would really help non-technical users.

I would rather see the core to develop into an actual framework and let the plugin developer and/or admins provide the user functionality (but more easy than nowadays). That makes live more easy for the core developers and have them focus to support easy extensible building blocks with little or no knowledge of programming at all  (just a logical mind) as their final goal. 

In my opinion, they also should (as stated before) make the framework adaptable to the owner in look and feel and constantly moving technological improvements in screens and devices.

Taking in popular plugins would shift focus to supporting that and gets us off the path of an open platform with easy extensibility and usability.

Elgg is closer to a framework like Symfony2 than a finished product like Wordpress. The core team's focus is on providing an API for developers to create plugins that allow end users to do things. @gkanters is right that the more content / feature plugins we pull into core, the more code we have to maintain that isn't related to making the API the best it can be. 1.8 and 1.9 actually removed content plugins for this very reason.

This doesn't mean I don't think plugin devs should make these sorts of plugins--I know Coldtrick has released a few plugins that address this. I have, too, actually...