The `swipe` UI already has a similar feature - when you `click` on the status bar you get something similar to Maemo 5's status bar where you can toggle things like BT/WLAN/2G-3G-DUAL/etc. but the point of a widget is to be always present - once you unlock your device it's right there and you can control the things you want while everything lays on top of it.

I guess `tabbing` on the events pane could be a solution - you just add a tab bar right bellow the general notifications (calls, messages, mails...) and then you can switch to a separate tab (e.g. social, media, books, whatever) of which some could host user-defined (or 3rd party app defined) control, or even purely visual widgets. I for one would turn off the `social` stack completely - I don't have FB nor Tweeter account and, frankly, I couldn't care less about those - I'd put there a RSS `bar` instead.

It would add to confusion, tho, and it's obvious that the UI/UX designers did their best to keep it as simple as possible, even at the expense of more swipes/clicks/whatever, so I don't think they'd consider such an approach... On the other hand, it would essentially turn the events pane into a virtual desktop pane, thus reconciling the both sides...