I'm not a fan of repeating myself, or of doing the same work twice. So when I first got a look at FieldAPI back at DrupalCon Paris, my thought after 'Wow this is going to change everything,' was 'Every module that converts its custom data storage to this is going to be doing the same work, over and over'.
7.x
I am now batting nodes, complete with imagefield, between separate instances of Drupal with merriment and glee. For yes, I do have a working beta of Content distribution.
I'm about to quickly write a service to get CCK's content_fields() array from the remote, distributing site, so that the retrieving site can show a UI of possible values for a Views nodereference argument. Try it. It all makes sense once you do.