Steve,
I totally agree with your comments, if the UK Forums here are put in a seperate section (ie seperated with the pink banner line) and UK trip/DVC report forums added under the section, then apart from getting a few more curious visitors, I cant see there being much change.
The UK board has a great atmosphere, which is helped by the fact that the number of posts to the board is manageable, I see the equivalent US forum and there are so many posts per day that it is hard to strike up the same type of Atmosphere/friendlyness.
As long as the posts per day stay at a reasonable level in the UK section (which I think it will) then I personally dont see a problem.
Some people will not like the fact that their username is unavailabe (used by someone else), but that is just one minor point, I'm sure we'll get used to the new names very quickly.