I had the same feeling Michael, at the moment you can name as many objects you want with the same name and treat it like a group.
The only thing I can think of is, one object, one name, so if you use that name again MoI will state 'name in use' then you either give the object another name or place an extra digit, eg. rim 1, rim 2 which would go into the 'wheel' group.

>One thing that I've been thinking about
> is whether Groups and Objects should
> be kind of merged together a bit more
> in the UI somehow.

The way NX 6 handles naming, is with what they call categories, we name a category and assign what ever layers to it, we either treat it as an individual object or a group or a mixture of both.

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