In the last discussion about it we (especially Preston, Torben and I, IIRC)
decided that before the user configures anything (using filetypes),
the preferred service would be arbitrarily chosen from the installed services.

Result : for text/plain, the default gets set to gvim instead of kedit 
or write ! (for those who have gvim installed, found by kappfinder)

It works as we said, but do we really want to ship a desktop whose default
action for text files is opening the ugly, non-user-friendly-at-all gvim ? :-)

I see no other solution that what I suggested long ago : a preference number
IN the application desktop file, serving as default (overriden by the 
user's profile).

+ : we can decide how the default config looks like for our application .desktop files
- : somebody (like StarOffice :)) can install services that screw up our files.

(or should we allow preferences > 5 only for KDE programs ? :-))) No flames, I'm kidding !)

I think it's better to require users to change their defaults when installing
some third-party software rather than when starting KDE for the first time
(who wants gvim ?? :-)

Or is there another solution I didn't see ?

BTW : gvim is an alias for vim, this has nothing to do with gnome :)

-- 
David FAURE
david@mandrakesoft.com, faure@kde.org
http://home.clara.net/faure/
KDE, Making The Future of Computing Available Today