If I understand this correctly (and if you all don't mind a user
contributing to the discussion), this would be a big plus. What I like
the most about Fortran 2008 coarrays (besides the elegant syntax) is the
implementation-independence. What the standard refers to as an image
could presumably map to an OpenMP thread on one platform, a MPI process on
another, or some mix thereof.
On related note, what will be even better will be if a future standard
allows the programmer to determine the mix in order to map processes to
nodes on a distributed platform and threads to cores within the node.