One change that might happen though -- there are newer CPUs that have (or will have soon) NX capability, but aren't SMP. (VIA have a chip ready, Intel are alleged to be putting NX in their next line of laptop processors, probably AMD too).
To take advantage of NX, you need PAE enabled, which means these kernels will need to run 686-smp even though they aren't smp. I'll probably be doing some lobbying in Jeremy's cube for an installer change on this hardware when I get some to test with.
To avoid confusion, perhaps a name change is in order?
kernel --> kernel-compat
and later
kernel-smp --> kernel
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