Indeed the features you mention are very worthy, and are now integrated in the RTM released last month (dashboard tabs are called widget views). It is true that having a lot of widgets can be very intrusive and your desktop can become very messy. For that particular problem you can go fullscreen, this showing only your BI Widgets, hiding all other Windows content. This is also inthe RTM

Thanks,

{Maz}
Business Objects Labs
http://labs.businessobjects.com