For the portrait desktop thing, can't we have independant portrait and landscape desktops? ie, my arrangement/icons/widgets in one view wont affect what I have in the other view.

Or the more practical alternate method, is the icons and widgets will remain the same but their arrangement will be independent in either view, without it being controlled by an algorithm. This way, only an initial algorithm will be needed to get an arrangement in portrait mode, then the user can change it and it will be remain fixed, even if he changes the x,y postition of the widget in landscape. I hope my rambling makes sense.