Thinking about this feature, if inkscape wants to be a drawing tool then it will never develop the ability to handle animations, they would be counter to the way a document is handled, printed ect.

but if inkscape is moving towards complete support of SVG only then it will be interesting to see animation features added, although I'd create a separate tool which used alot of the same code, because lets face it there is alot of really nice tools that can be developed for animation programs but aren't useful for a drawing app.