Yes, keeping a close eye on that. You mentioned Bits of Proof earlier, I support that effort as well. Seems to have a strong(er) code base, although don't take my word for it. Modular nodes ftw.
Bits of Proof was first, I think, but I'm not as familiar with it.
Also the Conformal guys live in the same city as I and show up at the local Bitcoin Meetups sometimes, so that's probably biasing me in their favour since I never met Grau in person.
One thing that I think would be extremely useful is if one of the teams that has done a reimplementation would start pushing code upstream to the Satoshi client, adding unit tests and documenting all the quirks they had to replicate to reduce the possible scope of an undocumented incompatibility that could cause a fork.
Maybe we could even pay for their time via a crowdfunding campaign.