New breed of menus

Hi. It's been a long time since the last post, but finally I could get some free-blogging-time :)
A few weeks ago I installed Novell's Suse Linux Enterprise 10. I'm not planning on ditching Gentoo any time sooner, but I got curious about some of the innovations the folks at Novell are doing. And I also had a few disk-space to waste.
My main interest was to see in action the new menu interface. Instead of the regular list of applications, this one is quite different. It gives more importance to the favorite and recently used programs (never really cared much about this). To get to the rest of the applications you have a search mechanism. Begin typing the name of the application you want and see the options start converging to that name. Beagle is the technology behind this.
At first glance, it seems more productive, specially for keyboard-intensive users. Just start typing the name and you find the application quite fast. However, we still have to use the mouse: we have to click the button that opens that window (probably there is keyboard shortcut, but I didn't find out) and then click on the application name after you found it. I think I could have found the same application with the same amount of clicks in the old-fashioned menu (most of the times). But definitely there's a trend going on here. Everything in the computer is now searchable, even the applications. And this interface somehow reminds me of the auto-completion features in most programming IDEs: hit ctrl+space and you get a list of options, which you can refine by typing in the first letters. I really would like a menu as productive as this, without the need of any mouse click.

Another use of this kind of search is when we don't know the exact name of the application (just the description)...but that seems of interest only for real newbies. Sooner or later anyone knows the name of all applications.

So after spending some time using it, I really felt it slower, mainly because I had to open a second window after opening the menu. It could be a lot better if it was directly embebbed inside the menu window.