It is probably worth mentioning that Inkscape is likely to implement some form of dock to help manage the Palette windows. It is also likely in the long term that the toolbar widgets in Inkscape will become more flexible allowing a somewhat more flexible layout of the user interface.
I have now started to put some stuff in the Wiki (maybe we can move it to freedesktop later). http://www.inkscape.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Free_Desktop_Graphic_Suite
Not sure how you want to arrange the page so I'm commenting here first, and I'll copy stuff across if you add some headings or something.
Stroke Dialog
The inkscape stroke dialog is what I prefer to call a Palette and it is intened to be always left open and is deliberately compact. The GIMP uses a transient dialog which is quite different and follows the GNOME HIG rules for layout of that kind of dialog. This is a perfectly valid approach and for GIMP users I dont think the stroke options are so important that they need a palette.
Close Dialog
The Inkscape close dialog is the closest to what the GNOME HIG specifies.
There have been recent attempts to get either a standard GTK_STOCK_DISCARD (the label would probably be "Close Without Saving") or a whole standard GTK Close dialog.
The GIMP has more than one close Dialog and (although the current version may have improved) last time I looked wasn't even internally consistant.
The GIMP has a seperate transform tool which I think might be better than than a dialog like Inkscape has but the on canvas transform tools in Inkscape are pretty good so I dont think I've really used the dialog.
- Alan H.