All in all, it is merely a demonstration of what we could be doing if users were nodes (or could at least participate in the nodeapi system).
I'm glad that you brought this up. The current thinking is that users should remain their own first class object but that a profile should be converted to a node. With this, we can deprecate most of profile.module and just use CCK admin as the profile form builder. Furthermore, this opens the door to "personnas" by letting a single user have multiple profiles. Yahoo is an excellent example of a site which lets a single uid have multiple personnas. I do think it is reasonable for a profile to be tagged with terms so the original suggestion in this thread of adding terms to profile makes sense to me. Now that CCK is in decent shape, I'd be pleased if someone experimented with the profiles as nodes design and eventually submits a patch for 4.8 -moshe