Not for Avatar, but we already have some support for the integration profiles in Joomla 1.6/1.7+. There is a user plugin built into Joomla in those releases which allow an administrator to easily ask for other fields. Avatar isn't currently one of them, and so it's not something we'd build in support for, but we do support showing those extra fields during registration. Additionally, we'll be releasing a profile plugin to allow profile import into those fields later this year.
We don't want to have our own avatar functionality, because like you said, there's already a lot of other extensions out there that do that and so many other extensions already integrate with those to display the avatar for different reasons. We'd just be another extension to do it, but have no real reason on our own to even need an avatar... it would just be for other extensions to use.
Hope that makes sense, but if you have any other questions, just let us know!
Alex
Allow new registrants to upload their own avatar if not via Facebook?
