For any wondering what works and how well, here's some stuff:

Some issues:
Wish the side buttons in hildon-input-method stuff would be proportioned to screen width... The stylus-board is just off the edge of usability. A little wider keys, and I'd be using the world's tallest xterm. I'm gonna get xkbd set up to cover the stylus-board; it'll displace whatever window, while xkbd does the work.

PDF reader "fit width" doesn't. It fits to 800px, grrrr...
eVince is cool, though, unsurprisingly.

The main menu is, ummm, broken. Doesn't know how high the screen is, and the submenus are half off the screen, which requires the d-pad to scroll through any long submenus.

Skype is a basket-case.

The control panel is broke.

See any patterns yet?

None of the camera apps I've tried are working; probably direct framebuffer rendering is confused.

Good Stuff:
GMail iPhone version (with greasemonkey) is now awesome...

The task-switcher menu is great, gets 800px high with 10 windows in it.

As mentioned before, eVince is good; in conjunction with eVince's ability to rotate images, portrait modes yield a landscape mode with portrait pages, fit to the height of the screen, and scrolling horizontally. The same eVince mode, but without the RandR, is good for scrolling 8.5x11 pages horizontally.

Gnumeric works fine; one of few apps that look at home in portrait windowed mode, though of course better in fullscreen. Portrait will be good for many spreadsheets, as mine are typically more columnar than lamellar.

Xournal is good.

VNC works perfectly; portrait mode + 1024x768 = scrolling horizontally only.

Oh, and I'm posting this with Opera on the desktop via rdp, that works too. Kind cool, if you've never seen WinXP on 480x800.

The clock app works, mostly.

File Manager actually gets by OK.


Quick question: Anyone know where I can get xrandr binary? Yeah, yeah, I'll go search now. (I need it to make powerlaunch flip screen and xmodmap d-pad, as I don't really have room for the applet and want the d-pad to work.)
Found it! from x11-xserver-utils in sid armel; I'm posting it and a little script below.