Change your icons to whatever makes sense to you and rename shortcuts to your liking.
The problem with building a customized interface as you are suggesting is that everyone has different ideas of what these items should look like. This is why the current GUI's are customizable and flexible. On my system, my shortcut to digital photos is a camera, music is a music note (not a CD case) and videos is a piece of film.
Just set up the current desktop the way you think it should be. I think what we have is quite nice actually. It caters to the people who use the default settings as most people wouldn't go to the trouble of changing things around but defaults are fairly intuitive. It also allows for customization.
Stryker
