Blender has a tool shelf now, though, and the entire interface is scriptable through python, so can't someone with scripting experience do whatever they like?
whoa floating panel I hear? I might be interested in this as well even though I don't work with maya. Do you script it with python or is there another way of adding custom panels with script- buttons?
what do you mean when you say 'now' pea, 2.5 is still beta and imo not fully battle ready ps, I have copy and pasting experience, not scripting experience.. so I'm not going to muck about with python interfaces