Hey guys,
You might be interested in knowing that portal-kernel and portal-service have been merged in r51543 a few days ago (April 30th). The new module (and JAR) will be called portal-service.
This was done for a variety of reasons. On one side it simplifies the set up of development environments (both through ant and with IDEs). On the other side it resolves some circular dependency issues that we had found between the two modules. Merging the two doesn't have any negative effect that we can think of.
You can find the details in the associated JIRA ticket:
http://issues.liferay.com/browse/LPS-9370
