I’ve always been bothered by the fact that you need to be root to mount anything (like an usb stick). It can be solved a bit by setting up udev rules and putting a specific device in /etc/fstab, but that only works for that single usb stick. Pretty annoying.
Googling only gives you stupid and silly solution (like allowing users to mount /dev/sd[a-z] — security risk).
Luckily I’ve recently been pointed to ivman, which is an automounter. It automatically mounts removable media for you in /media.
I looked at the internals of ivman, and noticed that it uses pmount, which is a wrapper around mount which allows users to mount removable media on a /media folder. Great!
Btw, you need to be in the plugdev group to use pmount.
Update It seems that gnome-mount also works fine when you’re in the plugdev group. Gnome-mount does about the same as pmount with the advantage that gnome-mount has got the nice gui integration everywhere in gnome.