Brad Touesnard writes about the release of the new WP Image Processing Queue plugin, that was born during WordCamp US Contributor Day this past December. Brad hopes something like this is rolled into WordPress core, and is encouraging developers to give it a test drive.
The potential speed and performance improvements of on the fly processing are attractive. Some hosts already do this, but figuring out a way for core support (perhaps depending on server resources available for it) would be really interesting.