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Maybe a bigger problem will be that you can't instrument what GIMP doesn't do: CMYK, Color Management, look/work just like the industry standard..

1. When did the GIMP project's first goal become world domination?
2. Yes, GIMP does support color managment. No, not to your satisfaction. http://www.khk.net/color/color_manager.html
3. Yes, GIMP does have some CMYK features. No, not to your satisfaction

GIMP is a great tool for many. Judging by your hysterical comments, it is not a good tool for you.

GIMP may be fine for preparing graphics for the web - because accurate colorspace management is useless when PC monitors vary so much, but if you are doing work that needs to go into a print publication, it seems like it lacks some pretty fundamental features. CMYK support yes, but also other color management features, support for ICC device profiles and colorspace conversions.

Without these features there is no way to get accurate colors in from a scanner or out to a printer, or to mix images from multiple sources in the same document. It's not just a matter of adjusting gamma values, you need to have profiles of the various RGB colorspaces that describe how various points in RGB spaces map to each other (how they are suppose to 'look').

There have been attempts to provide this type of functionality in Gimp through plugins but these are in fairly early stages. Also i believe a lot of the fundament color management algorithms are protected by patents.

Rather than give you a whole bunch of details about what "I" do that will add a lot of noise to the discussion, I'll point you toward the actual tools that may be of help in creating your own workflow:

scarse for command-line calibration and profiles work (pre-built rpms can be had at the rpm search sites, see also patches if you want to compile yourself.)

And of course these days there are also additionals things that you can do some tasks related to color management:

Photoshop and some other tools from device vendors in the Windows world will run under Crossover Office (I use PS6 mysefl).

Some basic (very basic) stuff also exists for GIMP if you are so inclined.

VMware is helpful if you need to run applications in a real Windows environment from within Linux with device support, including support for USB.

Finally if you are a coder you may find littlecms to be useful as well.

Not quite... For the most part, Epson scanners are very well supported under linux. (I'm using the 1240 on my machine with Redhat 7.2... Very easy hardware setup.) However, the Epson 1250 is an exception. See: this for more information. I hear it's possible to get the 1250 working partially with the HP 2200c driver, but full support isn't available yet.

1. Thin Xservers would are option. There are alot of cute little thin clients that are realy running Xwindows. Also old intel boxes running linux could do the same job. X was designed to run with as client/server application from the start so this is a natural use of X.
   
2. If you are running linux or unix and have a LOT of bandwidth you may be able to get VNC to work. There was a single floppy distro that woudl run VNC. If you have bunch of outdated boxes you may get a little more use out of them before they go to surplus. I do not recomend useing windows as a backend for VNC, under M$. The vnc server has to guess about some events, so some apps just wont work under vnc.
   
3. As far as I know, if you must use windows, thin clients are probibly not the answer. Thre is talk about a windows "terminal server", but I have not seen one up and running. If it is anything like the win2k "telnet server" it's next to useless.