I completely love Apple's <input type="search"> feature, and especially the placeholder attribute. I've decided to push for these to be implemented by other browsers, so I've submitted requests to WHATWG, Mozilla, and Opera for placeholder (and Mozilla and WebKit for a placeholder-color CSS property), and to Mozilla and Opera for <input type="search">. WHATWG says they will officially adopt them as part of the HTML 5 specification, and Google wants to implement them.

I'm not sure the best venue to make the same suggestions to the IE team, but they have a scheduled monthly chat that I intend to participate in two weeks from Thursday. Once WHATWG gets around to making them official, I'm sure Microsoft will get on board anyway, but there's no reason to wait for that.