Accessing Menu within a View - is it possible?

Theoretically it'd be possible to write a module that exposes data from the menu_links table. You could create a filter handler that first selects the link_path field "WHERE link_path LIKE 'node/%'". Then you can do some string trickery to get all those node ids in an array. Then you can set your filter to select all nodes from the node table where the node id isn't in your array. Not sure exactly how it'd be done in the code, but that's the general idea.

I've asked around about something like this for about a year with no luck... There used to be a module for 5.x, but there isn't one for 6.x. This just seems like a natural, a common use-case to have a thumbnail view and teaser, for example, for each sub-topic in a menu... a simple views filter would do that. I've been using Node Hierarchy for this, but it's a huge pain in the butt to basically duplicate the menu structure in a third-party module when it's sitting right there in the menu_links table already!