Hi Gregg, I like your setup, would you mind describing it a bit more? like a mini tutorial or schema drawing, so it could reproduced easily by another geek like me :)
Or I'll take it as a challenge, and as soon as I've got some time I'll try to do something kind-of like your setup ;)
Then create a cron job that runs this file as often as you want. It's actually pretty efficient, in my case runs in about 3 seconds if there are no significant changes.
My laptops run it every 20 minutes and my home directory (and music, photos and other stuff) is 100% identical on all computers I work on.
The server, in turn, can be configured to encrypt and push your stuff at night over to your slicehost account or something, when you're not using your connection and this the speed isn't much of an issue.
Or I'll take it as a challenge, and as soon as I've got some time I'll try to do something kind-of like your setup ;)