Moving downloads away from search results is a long-standing issue of contention in the interface. I'm pretty certain LimeWire is the only P2P program that has the two in the same tab. My personal thoughts on the design waver back and forth every few months. However, with the introduction of the 'downloading', 'save', and 'incomplete' icon on search results, it might be okay to move them to a separate tab.

Keep in mind that absolutely anything that changes this drastically would need to have a way to keep it the same. For instance, we could introduce a 'Wizard' mode and a 'Classic' mode -- much like WinZip has. Or, in 'Classic' mode we could have a preference that moves downloads into the monitor and moves incoming searches into the Connections tab (or some other unknown place).

As far as having a separate tab for New Searches & Search results... I'm not sure how I feel about that. It'd be very strange to auto-switch tabs after enterring a search, and even stranger to not show the results after searching. If downloads are gone from the search results, though, the filters can be above the results (like they are on iTunes).