Sometime on Dec 7, Sameer D. Sahasrabuddhe assembled some asciibets to say:
Hmmmm ... gotta check out how well ximian and apt-get get along ...
ximian has been adapted to all major distros, so it may work. Only question is whether red-carpet has been adapted to use debs. ximian will use its own updated called red-carpet, which is only gui based.
Some of the things that I don't like about red-carpet: no console mode doesn't let you force an install without checking for dependencies sometimes gets versioning wrong
Philip