a fair point, i'd argue that it's a bug in stash's behaviour that disallows this. personally i've had experience with stash working ok in this scenario often in the field, so perhaps only certain split files cause the issue. most likely when the divergence of the stash and the commit are in very close proximity in the file.
worth noting here is that stash behaviour has improved a lot in more recent versions, e.g. stash pop can merge with your working tree now, whereas a while back it would just fail to apply and you'd be stuck having to do a patch and apply instead.
i think the workflow i outlined is intended to work correctly and eventually will for all cases rather than just the majority. hopefully that doesn't scare people away.
out of interest do you know of any other way to do a similar kind of thing with any other tool? i find having to deal with these edge cases still way better than the alternative of having no staging area and only being able to work on 1 thing at a time personally.
See this question for more details: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13780700/how-can-i-run-gi...