Well, why should a stick be shown, before being plugged in? That behavior is correct. What you can do for a better understanding of the situation though: Deactivate automounting in nautilus in gconfeditor and the the stick will be shown (not mounted) in nautilus/computer-icon together with cdrom and other drives, but the moment you double-click on the stick-symbol to mount it it will disappear with all other icons but "filesystem". I also experienced that when restarting gvfs the icons reappear. And I could also produce a crash in a certain situation. So it really seems to be a problem around gvfs.
How do you know that the mentioned patch is only for Linux? Maybe it works for us, too and has never been integrated to the gvfs-freebsd-port? I would really like to try to include that patch into the port and then recompile it. But how would I do that?
And yes, I know, this thread started with a different question, but it was called "Automounting again". And I reacted because you claimed to be able to mount sticks.
Maybe the solution that original question is in question two of the HAL-FAQ
"How do I prevent hal from probing a device?".
And yes, I think I'm gomma write to the freebsd gnome team.