As far as I know, there was never a Cyclotron (at least from me) with a cycling area at the bottom. The status bar as cycling area has been chosen because it makes it easy to integrate into existing apps (libmeegotouch / Qt Components take care of handling events on that area).

In other words: All applications are really full-screen on MeeGo Harmattan, and the toolkit (libmeegotouch for most built-in applications and Qt Quick Components for some built-in applications and most third party apps) is used to display the status bar inside that fullscreen window. The toolkit is also responsible for handling touch events on the area, and that's where Cyclotron hooks in and adds the swipe left/right gesture handling (see the patches on the Cyclotron website for how simple / naive this really is implemented) - we can't really do that with the bottom area that easily.

Of course, one option would definitely be to implement this in the compositor (mcompositor, i.e. the application that manages all the windows), but the "Swipe" plugin to the compositor (that handles all swipe gestures for the window starting from the screen edges) is closed source, and as far as I know, the most recent versions (as shipped with PR1.3) of it don't include the necessary hooks anymore (that e.g. SwipeManager used; and even there only the pre-defined actions could be defined, no external command/D-Bus signal).

If the Swipe plugin was open, I could imagine a Cyclotron where you could swipe left and right to directly go between applications (see this video @ 02:35 for how this works on a Blackberry Playbook).