We've decided against this change for now (increases the size of the API too much). A HasElement interface sounds somewhat reasonable but we can add that later if needed.
I suppose if Element implemented HasElement, returning itself, we could avoid doubling the number of methods, but this seems overly tricky when calling getElement() yourself isn't hard. http://gwt-code-reviews.appspot.com/1828804/ -- http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
