It is still recoverable, albeit a bit difficult. It took me a quick sleight of hand trying to connect to my home's Wifi with the phone and SSH'ing into it to rectify the problem (by issuing a false value to the command he gave). I managed :P

What that command did was make the Hildon desktop fail to start after a reboot... which leaves me with widgets scattered everywhere, no wallpapers (just a black background) - basically it just killed Hildon's window management, I suppose.