Official Bridges

[Jhong]

Bridges could never be included in the core, or even look anything like included -- it would mean that phpBB would have to release an update whenever a bridged application broke compatibility, which would be ridiculously onerous.

I think the improved hooks system will make bridge compatibility much more robust by defining an approved attachment footprint.

[GravityDK]

I wanted to add that making it easy to have a single-sign-on between Wordpress commenters and phpBB users would be awesome.
Much like the phpBB devs discovered how much latent demand there is for phpBB beautifully integrated with Drupal, there is similar for wordpress.

Jhong's wp-united site is just the tip of the iceberg.

The minimum people require is cookie integration and a single-user account which works across both wordpress and phpbb.