We will open the core sandbox and meta issue soon, once the above dependencies are resolved or worked around, so that contributors can begin to explore what it means for Views to be in core.

We are planning one last major sprint before feature freeze in the week preceding BADCamp. (Pantheon will be hosting this sprint; more details soon.) The BADCamp sprint will be our chance to coordinate our final push to make Views core-ready. Once Views is committed to core, all further work will take place in our sandbox and the Drupal core issue queue.

The Relevent Content Bean essentially provides your site administrators with a light-weight query builder (build on top of EntityFieldQuery) for creating blocks that contain dynamically-filtered listings of nodes. Like Views, Relevant Content Bean allows you to select the number of node results to display, apply filters to the list of returned nodes, change the display options for these nodes, and manage the sort order of your results.

Use the Computed Field module to create yet another field stored in the database, combining the two (or more) fields you want to search, then expose a filter for that field instead of both of the individual fields. (I don't like this because it duplicates content/storage, and involves an extra module to do so).

Using Empty Text

There is a situation where one field of a Drupal View needs to pull its content from two fields (aka cck fields) of a node. In my case, they were default author field and a custom field called contributor. This example uses Drupal 7 and Views 3.

If optional the contributor field was not empty, it would display the contributor and skip the author field. If there was no contributor, then the author, which cannot be optional, would be displayed by default.

wondering why I wouldn't just build this in Views. Indeed, this might look a bit masochistic if you're used to Views. However, there are a few things to consider:
EntityFieldQuery is core. If you are interested in keeping your installation as lean as possible, this is something to consider. Views is a contributed module, and so it automatically adds size and overhead to your Drupal install.