Nice to see the link discussed between southern shaolin and Silat. Now i'm a hardcore Silat / Pukulan guy and have been for years, however i did get to meet a teacher from the SAOLIM martial art from Penang (
http://saolimpenang.com/), Malaysia which supposedly was called 'hood gar pai' or something similar. Although it's origins were southern chinese, it's movement are totally different from most silat styles.
There is a distinction however. A lot of silat styles have it's origin on Java, Indonesia, West Java more specifically. Some others on Sumatra (Minangkabau region), and there are a lot of silat styles coming from Malaysia which actually often look a lot different from Indonesian Silat. Probably because they have closer link (geographic location) to Chinese arts and also some Thai arts.
There is indeed plenty of Kuntao in Indonesia which generally is of Chinese origin. Funnily it sometimes depends on who you talk to. Some Indonesian people will call a style silat, while a chinese guy will call it Kuntao. In some stories the chinese win, in other stories the indonesian wins. Offcourse there has been quite a bit of exchange between the 2 cultures. Where it comes from is hard to trace.
My style is Bukti Negara which comes from the West Javanese silat Serak, which supposedly had quite some kuntao influence and thereby Chinese influences. If you look at the last silat video (The Chinese Martial Connection) you see practitioner Roberto Torres, known in the US for his Kuntao, but funnily the way he explains the moves probably comes from Bukti Negara (he uses the exact same setup and vocabulary) and I actually know him.
He does make some strange links between the chinese horse stance with feet inward, which is actually often quite different in Silat styles.
What is indeed true is that quite a lot of silat is very practical in nature, however you can see the same thing happening a with Chinese martial arts, the government wanted to standardize quite a lot of it, 'killing' a lot of diversity and over the years quite a bit of knowledge is lost. If i look at the current state of silat it's often either lacking in practicality (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFCAXlk1tKI ) or it's basically krav maga with some silat thrown in to make it 'unique' (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RU9xof8heYA)