oooooooo!  i greatly covet those materials!. 

ah!  now i see what you're saying about the ambient light.   it would be nice if IBL did handle specularity and falloff properly, sort of like what Synthetic mentioned about using it to mimic area lights.  or, it would be nice just to have area lights at least. i'm actually sort of surprised PhilC hasn't come up with a glowing object script to place and control point lights over a geometry.