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I don't think I would bother with the piston/ring swap unless I had to take the engine apart already. It might be a 1mpg difference at best and nearly impossible to measure.
The xfi trans is better than the base model but swapping it is up to the person doing the work. If they have done things like that before swapping it is not hard and I say go for it. But if they don't plan on swapping again if they ever find a 3.52 I would say wait a bit. But if they use the xfi trans and 13 inch tires they will get a pretty close ratio to 3.52 with 12 inch tires so that might also be an option.
As far as reliability, the engines don't seem to have any issues that make them have problems earlier than normal. At most they might need rings replaced a bit earlier than the base model but really I don't think it would matter much at all. Mine has 150,000 miles on it now and it seems to be about the same as any other 150k 3 cyl. It looks like pretty much all of them could use rings at around 175,000 miles to bump the compression back up. Some might make it longer and some less but that seems to be what I would expect out of a set of rings on any of the G10 engines.
If I saw an xfi drivetrain available I would probably grab it even if I didn't plan on swapping it right then. It would be good to rebuild everything and have it ready to just swap the entire drivetrain over some weekend, or if nothing else just to have the spare parts and the xfi cam.
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