Every solution I've seen people propose so far is basically Apple's .app style, which leaves you with multiple duplicate copies of libraries and wasted memory due to non-shared libraries. You can work around that, but all you do is move the hack out of user space and into the kernel via block de-duplication (though VMWare patented user space memory de-duplication right out from under the Linux kernel...)

This method doesn't benefit Free systems, but it does benefit closed source developers. Considering how hostile to open and Free software the space is, solutions like the above don't surprise me.