Is it a simple matter to have the window pan to follow text being entered using the text tool or should I request this upstream?

This is fairly Maemo/NIT specific. I don't think that this would be an issue with Xournal on the desktop or a full sized TabletPC since you have more real estate. But on the Nokia tablet, constantly having to hit the scrollbar to find where I was typing the text and to know when to line-break (because there is no wordwrap) was a pain when I was using Xournal to type out a document (mixed with diagrams and exported to a PDF :] ) the other day.