Status menus seem to be intended, among other things, to streamline indications. Some of these indications are not confined to the old Notification Area: others can be found on their own windows and indicate running processes, such as Nautilus copying some files, Firefox performing downloads or Brasero burning a DVD.
I have seen a series of mockups showcasing mockups for a progress indicator:
I would like to know if there are any actual plans to create a real progress indicator to house this type of indications.
It IS possible via library called Taskview. See https://github.com/ssickert/TaskView. It already has plugins for lots of apps, we just need an AppIndicator which supports it.
it won't happen with the current notification service... there are replacement notification services that could/would support such a thing, but the current dbus notification can't hack such a thing.