Just a heads-up --
Michael Dale is working on some cleanup of how the various JavaScript bits are loaded by the skins to centralize some of the currently horridly spread-out code and make it easier to integrate in a centralized loader so we can serve more JS together in a single compressed request.
Unless there's a strong objection I'd be very happy for this to also include loading up the jQuery core library as a standard component.
The minified jQuery core is 19k gzipped, and can simplify other JS code significantly so we can likely chop down wikibits.js, mwsuggest.js, and the site-customized Monobook.js files by a large margin for a net savings.
If you've done browser-side JavaScript development without jQuery and wanted to kill yourself, I highly recommend you try jQuery -- it's sooooo nice. :)
-- brion