Hi Mike,
Missed your e-mail because it went to the list only.
What you're demonstrating here is functionally equivalent to the simple
example I provided. (The example was intended to show how this feature
works, not necessarily how you would use it in practice.)
The key difference, is that a native reference carries no contextual
information with it - a form-helper for instance can't determine which
object the referenced property belongs to, the name of the property, or
even the fact that the variable is referencing an object-property in the
first place.
You also can't use the & operator to create a reference to a virtual
(__get/__set) property, because you would be creating a reference to the
value that is returned by the __get() method, rather than to a (virtual)
property of an object.
That's why form-helpers currently store references to objects, and
reference properties using strings - rather than using native
variable-references as in your example.