Thanks for the link - I'll check it out. My old SE phone had support for this with an open-source application - you could do almost everything through that. I miss that application, even though I can't remember the name of it.
I'm definitely with you - phones should just automatically transfer control to the PC when within range (although not disabling the phone, just let the PC be the default means of interfacing).
I tried the browser based text messaging provided by Nokia, but I found it to be entirely unreliable. It only ever alerted me of incoming messages once, and the Inbox was always poorly sorted.