Are Components usable?

Looking at the T3D updates, I noticed a few updates to the component system. Glancing at the source code, it seems that at the very least they can be used to dynamically add the component's methods to the host object, which is a very interesting feature. I assume they can also be used to override the host's methods, acting like a per-object package. But are they working? Seems I'd need to subclass from SimComponent in order to use the features.