Good way to build a grid in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign?

[laarree]

I love smart objects in Photoshop, and love nesting them, applying smart filters, embedding RGB smart objects in CMYK psd files, etc. One of the reasons I love Lightroom 2 for processing my photos is that I can select a photo, open it as a smart object in Photoshop CS4, do my retouching and retain Camera Raw editability all the while. You could take a bunch of horizontal photos, open them as individual smart objects, plop them in a grid, select the batch and convert that to a smart object, then warp the whole freaking thing, retaining editability of the original non-distorted photos throughout the whole process.