When setting /desktop/gnome/file_views/show_hidden_files or
/desktop/gnome/file_views/show_backup_files, it seems reasonably to expect the
filechooser to respect this 'File Management Preference'. Understandably, the
plain gtk+ versions of the filechooser cannot do so without introducing a GConf
dependency, but the gtkfilesystemgnomevfs version could do so.

Please note, this is not a moral argument about whether a user should or
shouldn't be able to see hidden files, just an observation that an expected
behavior is currently not honoured by the fileselector :-)