neither, I'm only trying tosay that sooner or later, you'll probably need to parse or modify distrospecific files (again, think in static IP networking, PPP users, ...) and this can be easily done through the GST backends, as the XML interface is standard across distros [1]
Hmmm..... Even with static IPs we probably don't want to use the distro specific config files. Instead we'd have /etc/NetworkManager/whatever.xml. However, it looks like it would make sense to use the g-s-t backends to do initial migration between the distro specific settings and the standard NM config.
-Seth