The Pages by Status and Assets by Status Gadgets are great but it would be much easier if the Finder had a Button or Menu that would Approve / Submit / Publish all Pages, Assets, or Design folders directly from the selected Folder in the Finder.
This should have an option to approve/submit content in all sub folders of the selected folder too. Often users are working on a specific section or set of folders in a site at a time and this would be a time saver.