As I say there, VLC's practically useless if we have mplayer - and almost certainly not worth the split effort. A better mplayer GUI is a well-known problem, of course, which anyone can work on without having to touch the mplayer source itself. UKMP is currently the best alternative and is starting to get there for videos (mmm, thumbnailing).

Firefox we've got for all intents and purposes now with microb (even including extensions - albeit with caveats); and it's only logical to assume that the Nokia plan is to drop Opera and ship microb as standard at some later point (maybe even the chinook-based IT OS 2008?).