[Markarian421]

Well, silicon is silicon, until some radical new technologies make it to market, the pixel size sets a limit on how well you can do. You can do worse in a lot of ways (small/bad lens, filling up that area on the sensor with transistors or masks, etc.) and you can try to gain some of that back with various tricks (like microlenses) but at the bottom of all that you have more or less the same bucket. (And yeah, exactly what you define as a pixel on a SuperCCD is a tricky question . . .) So to me it's a useful bit of information, especially in the current market.
But I completely agree that some kind of resolution metric would be really nice -- that's what the "effective megapixel" measure is getting at. This is completely missing right now. Canon publishes MTF curves for their lenses, maybe there's hope . . . (yeah, right.)

[VidPro]

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I've heard that some ISO group is working on a standard for "effective" megapixels -- for instance most 7 megapixel consumer cameras have a real resolution closer to 2-3 megapixels, so you're just wasting disk space and adding noise to the image by using a 7 megapixel sensor. But of course the industry is very resistant to anything like that.

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One thing that has always bothered me about the megapixel numbers is that most consumer cameras use JPEG compression, and not all even have any control over how much compression takes place.
Some do have (often only on the top resolution setting) two or three such "quality" settings, but no way to prevent the images being compressed and saved as raw. This, by definition, lowers the resolution, and may be where that 2 - 3 megapixel number comes from.
With cheap flash memory freely available, there is absolutely no reason to use any form of compression.
Why bother having a large megapixel count if you lose that resolution with compression, especially at the cost of added noise from the resulting small pixel sizes.
Obviously, I'm not asking you, just attaching it to your post, throwing it out there.