I ran through the whole process of getting this checked in, only to realize that there are a number of subtle api-checker failures that are exceedingly hard to get rid of. I'd rather we attack the user.Element -> dom.Element transition in a single, coherent pass over the widget library (which will probably need a design doc to get it right). For now, I've surgically extracted the core optimization from this patch here: http://gwt-code-reviews.appspot.com/143805
http://gwt-code-reviews.appspot.com/125806 -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
