Well a cross fader is only appropriate for dance mixes, etc... Pink Floyd albums aren't going to sound good being cross-faded. I know some rippers don't get the exact number of bits correctly, but a lot of them do, and EAC can be adjusted with offsets, etc. to help fix any ripping errors.

I believe that if the decoder did its job, completely gapless output would be possible with MP3. Like I said, the frame boundaries would have to be done right, and the decoder would have to skip over ID3 tags, but it could be done. The gapless output plugins on WinAmp are proof of that.