Other than simply enjoying the view from up in the mountains, I think it would be great to have a spyglass to equip to enable us to zoom in (somewhat) on the distance. There have been many times when I've wanted to surveil ruins, etc from a distance.

I second this. Using the bow to zoom is a workaround, but your stamina gets drained and it's not as leisurely.

+1
Sounds like a good a idea

Dwemer Spyglass!

Should be pretty easy to implement; at least I think it may be easy to implement. The Creation Engine was developed to host both The Elder Scrolls as well as Fallout, so it may be that the zoom effect is available and can be attached to an object in the game.

The only thing which worries me would be the actual animation of the player putting the spyglass to his eye and looking through it.

A script that zooms the FOV... I think that'd work. Maybe make it look like a spyglass while viewing with a screen effect.....

I'm not sure changing FOV would work. I tried setting it manually to look far across a river, and I couldn't see any details, just the base texture of the ground (there was no grass).

There was a http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=6964 mod for Oblivion that used OBSE (Oblivion Script Extender).