RE: Any 2009 manuals here yet?
Corvettes have had the skip-shift feature for a long time. I have owned several of them and it works fine. If you baby the engine with low RPMs, then it will skip from 1st to 4th. There is still plenty of torque to keep you rolling. If you keep the RPMs revving higher, then you have normal shifting ability through all of the gears. There have been overide kits for sale for ten years in all Corvette parts catalogues. You basically unplug the skip shift module from the transmission and the kit includes a plastic filler plug to replace it.
If this what Dodge has to do to win the CAFE game, and give us good manual transmissions, then it's really no big deal.