I saw this related question about publishing toolchain but I know many people did lot of work to produce publishing toolchains recently.
One great example I found is this project from akosma.
Avdi Grimm shared his work with org-mode in this project
I know there are (should be) many others.
What I'm looking for, is a publishing toolchain with
What I can
Take a look at asciidoc, this is what O'Reilly has started using and it is a refreshing break from DocBook. I use asciidoc, the tools and support leaves a little to be desired, but there are people working to create better alternatives (that don't involve Python and the existing Docbook pipeline).
Check out this: https://github.com/runemadsen/asciidoc
EDIT 1/6/13: You also really need to check out AsciiDoctor. Dan Allen from RedHat has been spending a lot of time on this particular package and Ryan Waldron. I expect great things from AsciiDoctor as it is starting to emerge as a foundation for a bunch of important AsciiDoc documentation efforts.