PostgreSQL and XML support

Hello!

I would like to raise a discussion about XML support in PostgreSQL.
I'm a person who is quite experienced in XML data management and new
to PostgreSQL. So, excuse me if I ask trivial questions about
PostgreSQL...

I tried to find something about support for XML in PostrgreSQL. As far
as I understand, PosgreSQL does not have native support for XML. But I've
found several works around.
1. XML databases build on top of PostgreSQL. They are XpSQL and XDB (sorry,
if I missed something). Are they alive and functionable?
2. Contribution made by John Gray (xml and xml2). This is a tool that uses
'shredding' for storing XML in relational tables (another words, it
decomposes XML document into nodes and places these nodes into tables in
such a way that we can reconstruct this document back). What do you think
about this tool?

In general, I have the following questions to PostgreSQL users.
- Are there any of you who need to store and query XML data?
- Do you already use PostgreSQL to store XML data or you are
just thinking about it?
- If you store XML data in PostgreSQL, how do you do it? What tool
do you use?
- Do you need some advanced query capabilities? Like XQuery, XPath 2.0
- Do you need some advanced update capabilities? Like node-level updates

And I have the following question to PostgreSQL developers.
Do you have any plans for native support for XML in PostgreSQL? By native
support I understand persistent data structured specially developed for
storing XML on disk and query/update it efficiently. As far as I know,
native
support for XML is a way other database vendors (Oracle, Microsoft, IBM) go.

Best regards,
Andrey