Sure, let's use what we can - I used the contouring routines in R, but to the user it shouldn't matter if it's using GRASS behind the scenes. The data still has to get to the other app and then back to QGis somehow. Perhaps the R method is slightly more convoluted since it needs to write an OGR data set, but then again using r.contour in Grass means writing a new grass map layer, and hence you need a Grass mapset set up.

I didn't have Grass support on the Qgis I had to hand, but I did have R and Rpy working, so I thought I'd have a play with that, just to see what a contour map as a line-vector map would feel like. I think the approach of having a direct rendering method in Qgis would be so much better, of course.

There's plenty of free and open source code for contouring floating around, so it could in theory be integrated into QGis, together with nicely labelled heights on the contour lines, and thick and thin lines and so on....

Dreams.