Hi, Carsten:
This is an interesting point, but I'm afraid it is not as simple as it seems.
I had the same idea, to have the same objects between my different environments (dev, pre-prod and prod) two years ago. One option I considered was to "export" the folder as I created it, with no objects created inside it, and then export every single object I created, so that I could "import" the empty folder in another environment (keeping the same GUID), and then "import" the objects I needed into it (one by one).
After importing the objects I needed into their folders, I could check in the console that things were Ok, but when I had a look at the logs in the server, I discovered that a new error was appearing, related to a user not available in the database.
After spending a lot of time investigating this error, I realized that the user missing had the same GUID that the user I used to create the objects in their first environment.
If you read the XML from an object, you can see an attribute named "ParentGuid" (I don't have a console in front of me, so this name may not be exactly the same) which references to the GUID of the folder where the object is placed (this value is replaced if you import the object under another folder). This is true also for folders: a folder is always placed into another folder :)
This happens because when you export an object, the security applied to this object also is included in the XML, and when you import the XML, the part of the security is also imported: if the security groups or users don't exist in the server where you import the object, you get no message about this in the import process.
I tried to export an user into an XML, but I couldn't find a way to do it...
So, the only solution I found for fixing this issue was replacing the GUID of the users/groups into the security part of the XML of the object with the users/groups from the new environment BEFORE importing the object in the new environment.
This will apply also if you have to reinstall a SMP and you have to create again the users/security groups, as they will have a new GUID.