Interesting Quicksilver or Spotlight interaction with Dashboard

I'm pretty sure Apple doesn't intend for a user to be able to use normal applications while viewing Dashboard Widgets. I find this annoying. Especially because the keyboard also apparently has no practical use when focused on the dashboard. Today I found an interesting way to work around this. Hitting F12 moves focus to the Dashboard and for the most part your keyboard now does nothing interesting. However, as with all applications, you can still use Command-Space to open Spotlight or (at least on my PB) Ctrl-Option-Space to open QuickSilver. Once either of those is launched, they will behave and launch other programs as normal, even though the Dashboard will be open on top of them. Though you'll still have the darkened background of the Dashboard, you can at least read through to what's underneath. This can be helpful if you've hopped into Dashboard to look something up, and you want to be able to refer to it as you type or if you have a Dashboard monitor for something you're doing in another program.