Out of curiosity, have you considered using the python evas/edje bindings? It could make for some fancy launch animations. Gustvo Barbieri has this very nice demo of an application launcher. Source code is provided with the cvs link, you need edje_cc from the edje-bin package to compile the .edc file to .edj. I tried it and it works very well on n800, but you'd probably lose the older 770 OSes.

BTW, chinook doesn't seem to support python desktop plugins, it says something like "unknown plugin type: python". I guess this will only be in the next major release (os2009?).