Yes, I've used that trick before with proprietary kernel modules (IIRC NVidia kernel module didn't like the different name) while I didn't want to recompile it.

What uname returns isn't that important. It doesn't say much. For example, you could call your Linux kernel 2.6.30 if you really wanted to.

You can definetely check if PREEMPT (RT) is enabled:

This should return 1.

See this article for more in-depth details.

You can also do some benchmarks.

You can share how it 'feels'. This is also worth something. No NIT is the same, so if you'd share your build other people can test and/or benchmark as well.

Ironially I'm not sure what kind of kernel I'm running right now, but it made the NIT a lot more responsive... uname tells me no useful information though. Case in my point for my 2nd point in this post.

PREEMPT (RT) should work very well on the current NITs with OMAP2. Look here. It has been ported to Linux/ARM (OMAP) since 2005.