I agree that you should post a lean-and-mean setup as the core install. I would love to see a minimal bootable Debian system as a tarball / deb with add-on debs for various features / functionalities. The Garage is brutally restrictive when it comes to file sizes.

Having done a lot of Debian apt-get installs on the tablet that turn a 100MB rootfs into a 600+MB bloat-system, I've grown to appreciate how much of your initial development is getting that lean, bootable core with none of those bloaty, unecessary packages, but also including custom rebuilt packages from maemo / Nokia to support the hardware.

Over on our chroot discussion page, we've managed to get a minimal Debian rootfs to compress down to 28MB. I guess the problem is that you can't boot to a terminal, because killing the Xomap X server makes the device reboot. So I think your XFce route is still probably the best. If anything, you could go even more lean and not include any WM at all, just start a full-screen X-Term in the core package.

You could have a separate deb in the project downloads for device-specific (not available from Debian repos) window-manager addons.