Form API: display a group of fields as a table?

I've done a fair amount of poking around d.o. forums and handbooks, and looked through all of the contrib modules and I've still come up empty - this one of those problem-solving questions I'm a little surprised no one else seems to have encountered (or at least, gotten stuck enough on to bother posting or contributing a module for.)

Basically, I have a bunch of related fields that I want to display in table format; a header row containing titles and each subsequent row containing a textfield (although really, the field type doesn't matter). Sort of like this:

I know there's the CCK Matrix module but, in my particular case I'm not using CCK - and it seems like displaying fields in a table could be useful for general UI-building apart from CCK.

So, my question is this - is there some quick, no-brainer way to do this with stock Form element types that should be staring me right in the face, or is a module warranted? And if so, is there one already out there that I'm just not finding? I don't mind writing the module, I just don't want to reinvent the wheel, duplicate effort or clutter up the contrib directory.

I'm imagining a module that implements two new form element types:

'rowset' - behaves more or less like a 'fieldset', but wraps its children in a <tr> tag.
'table' - also behaves like 'fieldset', containing 'rowset' elements. Also receives a '#header' attribute containing an array of column headers.

So to build the matrix above, the code might look something like

If anyone has any thoughts/insight, they would be much appreciated!