When I first got a Mac, I searched around about this, and in my searching (which revealed no better answer than the one KingJr provided, natch), I found a lot of posts from people during the Panther beta phase, indicating that people thought Apple was going to make MS burns the standard for Finder with the release of Panther. Of course, they didn't. I don't suppose there's any hope Tiger will do this, or at least provide an option?
WinXP's Explorer manages to do MS just fine, without anything confusing or befuddling or dangerous. So I definitely consider it possible, and I don't see how it falls into the "no, a one-button mouse really is better" dimension.
OTOH, I could see that the drag and drop method, where files are continuously, instantly, written to the CDR/RW and the disk is treated virtually as if it were a hard drive, is dangerous, because of the incompatibilities you incur if you don't remember to "make the disc compatible" with other systems when you eject it.
But MS is a perfectly reasonable request, IMHO, and messing with disk utility and images seems like a lot of unnecessary hassle.
A couple of examples where I think it's valuable:
1) When I do research analysis, I used to be in the habit of making a new folder every day, titled something like 20040302 (for today), and dumping all my files -- journal articles I pulled, my manuscript, excel files, and so on, into it. The next day, when I open my SPSS output files or whatever, I save them in a new directory. That way, I can walk back through all of my past work very easily. At the end of every day, I burn the latest day's folder onto the CDR for archival purposes....
2) When I'm writing fiction, I also want to keep all old versions of all documents, so I can go back to them. I keep a CDR as an archive, and I'd like to burn each chapter onto it as I go.
So in both cases, it isn't really like a thumb drive. It's just that I'd like to incrementally archive parts of my data as I go. And obviously, I could get a network drive or whatever for that, but the hardware is already in my iBook that will do a perfect job of what I want. It's just a hassle....