Any news on the AO color node?

Sorry, I did a few searches but have not found anything on this.

An AO color node was originally in the targets for 2.71, but then got pushed off to 2.72, and now has vanished completely from the targets list.

I know we can bake textures or use vertex colors to do this, but was really hoping to do this in a node.

Has anyone seen any news on this?