I suppose it was a "wouldn't it be nifty if it could" not a need. My needs are already met by boost::any and my question was quite precise so I guess your answer is no. I presume you can't pass the .type to on of your own templates either and expect the template to understand it as the type it represents.

Variant seems functionally inferior to Any, the big'y being that you need to know all the types in advance.