This would be awesome for all sorts of work, from medical animation to characters poking each other:
http://www.usefulslug.com/2012/12/soft-contact-deformer/
Part of the new upcoming version 6 of Messiah.
It would certainly be amazing to have for all kinds of uses. On a related note, is there currently a good way to prevent self-intersection of a character without a cloth/softbody using current tools? I’m thinking along the lines of elbow creases and whatnot.
We already should be able to do similar animations with vertex group modifiers or dynamic paint.