I really don't see how that is a feature worth paying for these days...I've used PSE and prefer Picasa and its facial recognition and library browsing better.
No, it doesn't but the defacto standard for it is the (free) UFRaw which directly imports RAW images to GIMP for editing.
I have used Photoshop Elements, and GIMP blows it out of the water in terms of overall photo editing capability. PSE has some amazing tools to do common tasks easily if you don't know how to use the power of PS or GIMP.
Have you even used GIMP enough to form such opinions? I question that given your statements: