9p is v9fs in linux. There's FUSE 9p stuff for other platforms. There's a virtualized Erlang runtime that sits directly on Xen as the OS that uses 9p. 9p is part of QEMU's way of talking to the guest (or is it the host?) OS.
It's been on a lego mindstorm brick too.
To me, kernel dbus is a bit more like mach_ports. Those have their own advantages too. As did Solaris Doors.
That kind of pervasiveness involve replacing all i/o through the entire system with dbus. File systems, netlink, sun rpc, mmap, signals and kill, tcp, and so on.
And then making dbus sanely deal with networking and authentication.
9p isn't just pervasive: it's the only way to talk to the system, which means that if you want to mess with namespacing things, all you need to think about is 9p.