That's essentially what my Datatable table.adp list template does. My table.adp is a drop-in replacement for the existing one and does progressive enhancement. I actually did it for cosmetic reasons (to match other non-list Datatables), and to get the row highlighting. Beyond that, the only thing I can think of that this provides is client-side sorting, which ultimately is quite difficult to do right in a template because of the varying data types.
If we could define data types for the columns and specify a URL for retrieving JSON data to populate, we'd have pretty much everything we need for an "ajaxified" table except inline editing, but as mentioned previously, the inline editing might be better handled by a form template. I'm really not sure about that, yet.
