in the "What i wish to have in Blender" session
Roland and Bassam wished there where named layers in Blender.
I thought about it and made some screens:
Layer name and color (for wireframe mode in 3d view) setup in the draw panel:

Layer names when moving objects from one layer to another:

Layer names in the headerbar of the 3d view:

I didn't find a good solution for the Armature layer yet (Bassam's wish).
Not all file formats support multimaterial per mesh so it would be cool at add an entry to the Seperate menu called "By Material Indices":

Karamba!
Bart.