The saved searches are actually custom views that could help you find documents faster. Create custom views for published documents, documents that are shared with you, starred spreadsheets or for documents last opened in the past 7 days.
Custom views could be a great addition to Gmail, while Google Docs lacks the powerful operators from Gmail. The list view from Google Docs looks more and more like a file explorer and should be used for any kind of files, not just for documents, spreadsheets and presentations.