If somebody hasn't yet heard of this:
"GemRB (Game engine made with preRendered Background) is a portable open-source implementation of Bioware's Infinity Engine.
It was written to support pseudo-3D role playing games based on the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset (Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale series, Planescape: Torment). It should run on GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, OS X, possibly other UNIX derivatives and others. It is licensed under the GPL."

It is still work in progress, but as a open source engine rewrite it enables one to run BG, IWD et al on newest Windows and also natively (without Wine) on Linux and OSX --- and on many other OSes. :)

More information here:
http://gemrb.sourceforge.net/wiki/

I gave some read about it a little time ago... it actually enabled to play Infinity Engine games even on some cellphones! :)

Prior to GOG appearance, this would have been my panacea for gaming on Mac; right now, however, there are just too much good ol' games to give up a nice virtual machine :D

Yes GemRB begins to look nice, but it is far from finished. There are still some crippling bugs even if it is in Beta, check out the known issues to get up to speed on that.

I wouldnt say crippling, BG1 and BG2 work seemingly fine, I dont think Throne works very good though, the more people that try it the better. I believe you can go over the maximum number of characters in the party, and have more kit classes as well as more spells. I could be wrong though

Not right away, it's possible with mods though. A larger party probably requires source code changes, at least in GemRB's python scripts (at least those changes ARE possible with GemRB, unlike the original engine).

The games themselves would also have to be patched in order to properly support a larger party. Infinity's internal scripting language did not support "iterate this command over all members of a party", so lots of commands are run specifically on "Player1" through "Player6".

Yes, thus "possible with mods".

Is there any benefit to using GemRB other than running the game on non-native platforms? Are there any bug fixes or additional features, for example?

Support for mouse wheel scrolling in textboxes, and possibility to trap the mouse cursor in windowed mode so you won't have to move to the edge of the screen (makes scrolling the game area a lot easier on multi-screen setups). Those two come to mind directly, there are some others as well.

Soooo, anyone know of such mods that might up the party cap? Or anyone who know how one might enable this?

No, nobody has tried it yet. While the gemrb part is pretty simple, the script patching and gui enhancement require much more work. Nobody attempted it yet, but it will definitely be done at some point as it is an often requested feature. For now, we focus on more important things.
There'll be a new release with more great stuff in a week. :)

Putting BG1 on my Nook Color right now. :)

Just got BG1 running on my Droid Charge. This is awesome and the mouse emulation works better than it does in my DosBox Games. Highly recommended to android users. I never finished BG1 back in the day when I had it on 6 or so CDs. Now I can finish it and perhaps move on to BG2

Oy, this makes me feel ill for throwing out all my old game disks last time I moved. Figured they were useless. At least I have a few from GOG to load up on my phone.