Benson,
yes I see some benefits of Tear (it can be much lightweighter than maemo browser because of complex client/server architecture of latter), but it really still need much work to be stable (it crashes very often on my device) and integrated into the system (I mean bookmarks and so on). I'm not sure there are enough developers and free time to do this, unfortunately. If they will succeed I'll be very glad, but I will focus on integrating webkit into default browser.