Yes, if I were forced to use JS for loading the primary content I would do that too. There are a couple of options for doing so if you don't want to roll your own (and you don't - it is actually a very complex thing to get working cross browser), JQuery History [1] which is nice and simple, and JQuery BBQ if you need a bit more control.
Personally I think it's a little early for pushState, and degrading to #! is really ugly, so for now I would say just use normal page loads like everyone else unless you have a really good reason (good reason: GMail. bad reason: glorified blog.)
Personally I think it's a little early for pushState, and degrading to #! is really ugly, so for now I would say just use normal page loads like everyone else unless you have a really good reason (good reason: GMail. bad reason: glorified blog.)
[1] http://tkyk.github.com/jquery-history-plugin/ [2] http://benalman.com/projects/jquery-bbq-plugin/