Looks like Linus is back. I think I'd better wait before spamming him with patches though.

rkarl: yes, it does do that, but the fact there's no separate "word count" sucks rather. It's quite easy to fix (modulo a decent definition of what a word actually is), but you can leverage LyX's rather spangly conversion framework to make a rather hacky solution :

\format wordcount wc "Wordcount" ""
\viewer wordcount "xterm -geometry 30x2 -e less"
\converter text wordcount "wc -w $$i > $$o" ""

SORN: Ghostwriter by RJD2. Lovely bouncy Scruffular stuff.