The title is used in all kinds of special ways, like as the default link to the node, so we were going to leave it alone for now. We could maybe make it a 'locked' field though (although we haven't really defined yet what 'locked' really means.) Anyway, someone would have to spend some time digging through the code to be sure to uncover all the implications of handling the title differently before making any change to that.
Karen
Perhaps I missed totally the FiC features but why can not $node->title
be generic textfield as well?
k