Do multiple updates to the same node really happen that often? I thought people were not usually able to edit the same node.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't think the node cache is the right place to implement your idea about saving the original version. Don't you want to save the version that this user originally received, rather than this process? There's no guarantee that a user will even be on the same machine when their form submission is processed. Seems like you would have to do it based on session and keep it in the database.

Having a separate cache for nodelets (or anything else) is no problem. You can have as many caches as you want.

Finding a solution that works across all the machines in the cluster is harder but possible. It would require something fancier like messaging daemons or some database trickery. Just making the cache multi-process is enough of a challenge for now.