People have been running non-hildon apps to their primary X server for a long time (with or without chroot); the benefit from using VNC was that it permitted simultaneous use of two window managers, one for hildonized and one for "normal" apps, with easy switching.

And I really don't mean to bash your method, or to slight your effort, or even your thoughtfulness in posting it, so please don't get me wrong; but that method or something similar has likely been obvious to most people who would get that far along.
I would symlink those things (unless I experienced problems with that; some bad programs could refuse to deal with symlinks properly), so I would be able to set it up once and leave it alone; but it's essentially the same idea, and I think it really does count as a trivial step.


As for what counts as "changing the operating system", <shrug>whatever</shrug>. You're using relatively few things from the original system; X is the only major userland component from ITOS, assuming you use it with a WM from the chroot. (Which would be my tendency.)



In a few weeks (after qualifiers), I'll likely attempt to make a "wrap-it-up" script that clones the essential elements from ITOS into a Debian rootfs; at that point, if nobody beats me to it, we'll have a file-list of maemo files that are actually needed, but it will arguably be running Debian, even if a handful of files (some of which will be GPL anyway, but still not Debian) are copied over.

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From there, the GPLed files can be moved into the filesystem for distribution, and if the system can boot with no proprietary files, a script can gank the ITOS files needed for battery-charging, wifi, and whatever else, on the first boot. Then it would be a legitimate OS unto itself, by any meaningful definition I can think of.
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