Adobe Labs has just updated their Adobe AIR 3.0 preview with - what I think - is one of the biggest changes to the platform yet. The latest release candidate provides support for native extensions. This allows you to extend AIR beyond what's supported in the SDK and create hooks directly into the device. Oliver Goldman has a great introductory article here: Extending Adobe AIR. Lee Brimelow has a good example as well. Finally - I've updated RIAForge to provide a new category just for this feature. Sure - it's a bit early - but I want to encourage folks who try out native extensions to consider sharing their results on RIAForge.
By the way - don't forget the other cool new features, listed on the Labs page.