In an earlier post I asked about designing applications with offline support. MSDN has recently published an article by Sean “Early” Campbell and Scott “Adopter” Swigart of 3 Leaf Solutions describing a method using datasets and web services. This is definitely getting closer to what I was originally looking for and I'm hoping Microsoft will publish an article soon incorporating some of these concepts and some guidance for using MSDE and SQL Server with replication services to develop a more robust solution.
If you haven't been to the 3 Leaf website yet, I highly recommend it. As Sean and Scott's names imply, they are definitely into adopting new technologies and sharing their experiences with the community. Their latest presentation, “What's known publicly about Whidbey, Yukon, Longhorn, and Indigo” is particularly interesting as it covers a lot of what's coming down the road for .NET and the Windows development platform.