For more information on the above method check out this link on HAL:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/hal
You might as well get used to it .. from what I've read it looks like this is the future of Xorg (the the dismay of some who like to hard-code things). No more hard-coding anything into an xorg.conf file. It all works on a 'hardware Abstraction Layer', kind of like how 'plug-n-play' works in windows I think. HAL takes care of getting the plug-n-play info when a USB device is plugged in (or firewire, I'm sure) and then sets it up in xorg for you. In the above case I still had to create a policy file but I think ultimately the plan is that it would do that for you as well, or maybe xorg would do that part of it but the content seems it would be independent of the hardware so it should be pretty cut-and-paste.
Anyway, in my Ubuntu distro the xorg.conf contains almost nothing and contains this blurb at the top:
# Note that some configuration settings that could be done previously
# in this file, now are automatically configured by the server and settings
# here are ignored.
Very cool if you ask me. Wish I'd have tried it a week ago, before I wasted all that time on hard-coding everything as I did to no avail.