Seriously this needs to be done. We should be able to use the "Add OLE DB Connection" for MySQL just like we can for other DBs. With the proliferation of LAMP deployments it would be nice to be able to share data with web apps without any major hoops to jump through.
OLE DB providers are provided by the database provider not the client applications connecting to them. If you install a valid OLE DB provider for MySQL you can use that to connect to MySQL databases, this has always been supported. I think the request here is to add support for MySQL as a dbms for the geodatabase.