I believe @Stuart Wright might be having this developed for XenForo eventually (mark forums read from node icon). I think he's keen for his moderators to still have these actions available to help ease the transition from vBull.
I think it's fair to say, however, that XenForo won't ever implement actions such as that. I'm pretty sure I've seen @Mike mention a few times that actions similar to that are not easily discoverable (element of truth really - software should be mostly self explanatory and intuitive to use, whereas you'd need to be told explicitly that double clicking a forum icon would perform an action) so I think something like this will exist as an add-on but maybe never in the core.
In the mean time, this might be a good compromise: