Yes, you're right, I could just use the library view way of browsing and have the bottom file list set to "Grouped Details". The only thing with that is that with that method the album art used for each grouping is not necessarily going to be the album you want to see, and the bottom files list in details mode is unhelpul until you have filtered it to point that you only have a handful of albums.
My point above, was when browsing using panes, and album thumbnails, you need a quick way to jump to that album's contents (ie. without having to scroll and search out an album again after changing the list type).
The photo viewschemes are there with the new "zoom in on the selected photo" behavior. Maybe a similar thing could happen with album thumbnails in music viewschemes. You could zoom in on a selected album and when you hit a threshold zoom, you could see the album art with a list of songs (links), and some basic infomation (ratings, track numbers, date). Since full zoom never fills the viewport with the picture (due to aspect ratio), there is a lot of space there to be used, and the whole intuitively implied meaning of "zoom" is that you want to see more about something too, so once used would be a really powerful way of browsing.
This could also be used in photo viewschemes. Next to the photo you could see basic info (rating, caption, date) and a couple of fundemental tools (rotate left, right).