Many themes are designed to work with specified plugins, but there is no standard way for authors to specify this, e.g. some use readme.txt files or provide it in their documentation.
What would be nice is a standard and recommended way for authors to record this in the Theme meta data in the style.css file, e.g.
/*
Theme Name: MonkeyMagic
Theme URI: http://urbangiraffe.com/
Description: Theme dissection example
Version: 1.0
Author: John Godley
Author URI: http://urbangiraffe.com/
Plugins: plugin1, plugin2, plugin3
*/
That way, people utilising themes could see at a glance what additional plugins are required to support a particular theme.
