One of the biggest draws for me to switch to using KDE was the introduction of 4.4 and the ability to grab content from the web, drag to the desktop and have it create a widget. I've installed the Mandriva RPMS from ftp.kde.org on my Mandriva 2010 box but for some reason this functionality appears to be missing

Am i doing something wrong?

If I recall correctly mandriva uses the folder view containment by default instead of the desktop containment. That may be the reason.