I think this is not too hard to do: a simple ant task that copies the xconf for a block into the xconf directory and adds all include statements.
The more it think about this, the more I believe that <imports> should not be done explicitly but implicitly, based on some aggregated dependency information (for example, the blocks should have their block descriptor block.xml and include the dependency information there)
If I have time, I will look into that this weekend, but can't promise anything :)
Carsten
-- Carsten Ziegeler - Open Source Group, S&N AG http://www.s-und-n.de http://www.osoco.org/weblogs/rael/
