OK, look everybody: the Garnet VM is NOT a product. It's a cool piece of tech, and if you find it useful for something that's great. But all it is the Garnet (don't say "Palm OS!") compatibility layer from ACCESS's already failed mobile Linux OS. Both Palm and ACCESS have failed to create compelling Linux platforms, and they're toast. For ACCESS's part, they apparently thought they'd strip out Garnet and get it running on Maemo as a technology demonstration (Maemo has most of the underlying libraries already). Maybe they thought someone would find a use for it they hadn't thought of, I don't know. But you're right: there's no there there, because this thing's original reason for being (transition Palm users and their apps to a new seamlessly integrated OS) has gone away.

On the nonfunctional apps front, I can shed some nonspecific light on that too: Garnet VM pretends to be Palm OS 5.5, a version that never existed before on a device. Every version of Palm OS has tweaks and weirdnesses that breaks some things, even new devices that supposedly have the same OS version. Doubtless that's what has happened here; many apps will have to be tweaked to run on the new OS, and most of the Palm app developers have ceased to care.