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So, here's my use case:

I've got a headless low-power PC running XBMC (Gotham). Ideally, I'd like to connect to it from our desktops. Prior to Gotham, I was using the MySQL setup and yeah, everything worked... but I see benifits of the modularity and design of upnp support. Currently, (as others have mentioned) upnp support does not have all the features that MySQL has.

While, I was exploring some of the new features of Gotham (specifically, https://github.com/Jalle19/xbmc-video-server)... I saw how rich the XBMC's RPC mechanism is: It can query for content, stream videos, etc.

So, it got me asking the question: Does the RPC mechanism has enough features that it would possible create an XBMC "thin client". On a desktop I'd fire-up the thin client and search for videos/music/whatever and it would forward these requests (via RPC) to another machine (my headless PC). Likewise, media content, thumbnails, resume, and watched status's would all be proxied to the headless PC.

Ofcourse, if the headless PC was running a different version from the thin client - problems would arise. ...but I imagine presenting to the user, api version mismatches and reduced functionality would be a suitable solution.

Anyway, is this a completely unrealistic solution? Or would it just create all the same problems as MySQL solution. Or in the near future will XBMC to push all of its features of into upnp... then calling XBMC client a over-glorified upnp client

Yes, and some people have done this. For example, I think Yaste can be both a remote and a "thin client" to XBMC.

I had this same idea over a year ago. What I had in mind was an interface inside XBMC which would abstract the retrieval of e.g. movies from the database and would allow users to change the configuration to use an implementation that would get all movies from another JSON-RPC server instead of from a database (MySQL or SQLite). Unfortunately the current code is very very database oriented and JSON-RPC doesn't provide all the necessary features. Therefore I haven't done any real work on this approach but it's still somewhere in the back of my mind.