We have made some progress when connecting the Xbox360 DVD ROM to a PC - reading the firmware and then writing back to it. Our goal is to make this plug and play - as simple as possible that anyone could do it with no fuss - and without any great expense.
We have a couple of products lined up to make life incredibly simple for the DVD drive modder - one of which will (in our opinion) be the ool of choice in the near future.
Here's a picture of a 360 DVD ROM connected to a PC via the comments