Rather then enhancing get/post, I'd deprecate them both and promote more use of $.ajax. It uses "GET" as default, therefore $.get is redundant anyway. get and post automatically encode their data paramter, $.ajax does not. The "encoding" is the same for both get and post, so this could be moved to $.ajax, but not without an API change.

load() automatically inserts the loaded stuff into the DOM, is there really a usecase where load() needs access to the response object?

Maybe,this will work...but $.post/get are simply convenient wrappers for $.ajax without "method" argument anyway,but responseXml must be available IMHO(in success/error too,not only in complete).load() need to access response object in case of chained/sequential/dependent processing(load,...,...),same as JQuery processing model itself.

Fixed in SVN: The callback for load() gets the responseText as first parameter, the status as second and the actualy response as third parameter.

Any limitations mentioned for $.get and $.post won't fix, because those are just convenience methods for special cases.

Due to some refactorings to the AJAX module, it is now possible to pass a key/value object to $.ajax, it gets converted into a query string if it isn't a string already.

Expect a new feature in jQuery 1.1: Global settings for $.ajax that allow more then one request to reuse the same settings.