With bug 10852 fixed, making such a request no longer causes a crash, but the request needs to be actually sent - this is needed e.g. for usage statistics or for cleaning up server-side sessions. NB: looks like closing a window and navigating to a new URL are handled differently in this respect.
See also: http://www.w3.org/2006/webapi/track/actions/137
I don't think there are any promises that an asynchronous XHR is sent from unload. Browsers allow the web page to create such a request, but they make no guarantee about delivery. The requests spawned from unload are usually just aborted immediately afterwards. I believe web developers expect to have to do a _synchronous_ XHR if they want to make a network request from unload.
<rdar://problem/5428049>
FWIW, we track async version of this as bug 26817.