This means that network manager no longer pulls gnome-related packages, which is very good news. If this is the case in other distro's I think we can converge on this solution.
mburns did a test on this yesterday and confirmed that on Fedora it also does not pull in Gnome/X, so it looks like on both Fedora/Gentoo we're good with NM.
Still hoping for dwilliams to chime in on my questions from yesterday on this thread :)