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It's most peoples' experience that grid encourages good layouts and makes it easier to get them than does pack. And for most people, particularly for newbies, trying to explain the behavior of the packer is, umm.. challenging (because of things like the order of packing being hugely significant). Grid is clearly the right way to go for doing mainstream interfaces today. While pack can be useful in certain cases, its clear that grid should be positioned (so to speak) as the primary geometry manager in Tk, and certainly the first one people encounter.
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Will sufficient defaults be enough to handle all the different platform rules about how to do spacing between different widgets, borders on the outside of a window, etc.? Will we need to look at other mechanisms, so e.g. you could do things like "grid .... -spacing button" or "-padx button" to introduce more abstract names for spacing, like we can do abstract font names?
Grid can be a bit more cumbersone. You can't have a one-liner which defines and manages a resizable widget. Maybe grid could be modified so that cells with -sticky ew create a column with a weight of 1 unless otherwise specified, and cells with sticky ns create a row with a weight of 1. Maybe add a -weight option as well.
Note that there are recently submitted TIPs on making grid easier to use from the script level. TIP #146 [link] and TIP #147 [link].
A wiki page about grid: [link].
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