People need to understand that the purpose of the Pseudowire stuff (PWE3) is to enable service providers to offer existing services over IP networks, so that they can convert their backbones to IP without first requiring that all their customers change their access equipment. Producing the protocols needed to enable migration from legacy networks to IP networks seems to me to be quite in the mainstream of IETF. The technical issues, involving creating tunnels, multiplexing sessions through tunnels, performing service emulation at the session endpoints, are all issues that the IETF has taken up in the past, there is nothing radically different going on here.
(To those who think that other standards organizations can do this better, well, representatives from those other organizations feel free to drop in on the WGs in question, so we are familiar with their level of expertise on IP. Let's just say that if we want to aid in the migration of legacy networks to IP, these other organizations are not what we would want to rely on.) One can think of the VPWS work in L2VPN as taking the PWE3 stuff and adding some IP-based auto-discovery mechanisms to facilitate provisioning. Again, this isn't out of line with what the IETF typically does. The VPLS work is more difficult to position within the IETF, as it is hard to avoid a lot of stuff that overlaps with IEEE (a standards org which really is worthy of respect, unlike some others), and extending ethernet over an IP network is arguably a bad idea. On the other hand, the purpose is the same as indicated above; service providers can migrate from their Q-in-Q ethernet networks to IP networks, without first requiring their customers to switch from an ethernet service to an IP service.