Looking into the jQuery source, it seems like this would be pretty daunting ("nodeType == 1" is checked in 5 different places, making it seem like a non-trivial fix).
Perhaps the next best bet after a proper selector would be a function that, for each matched element, adds the jQuery objects for its text node children, and then removes the original element. Can something like this be done in jQuery? Thanks again for any advice, Jed Schmidt