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Currently there are three methods for advertising smb/cifs shares over a network. The legacy NetBIOS over TCP (Windows XP etc), LLMNR (the Vista/Win7 method) and Zeroconf (Apple's method aka Apple's Bonjour).

Samba (possibly outside the scope of this brainstorm but possibly just as important) and Dolphin should support zeroconf as an alternative smb service advertising/browsing method. It is more efficient and more reliable than the NetBIOS over TCP method including removing the need to be in the correct 'Workgroup'. This shouldn't be to hard given KDE's underlying KDNS-SD API and/or the common inclusion of Avahi in many popular distros. (Eventually LLMNR should be supported as well but as far as I know it isn't in that widespread use on anything other than the new Windows versions and even then has limited use.)

I believe that Apples version of samba already does this using the following
service type and text keys (as defined in http://www.dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html).

smb Server Message Block over TCP/IP
Defined TXT keys: u= p= path=