My Easy Mer is a hack job where I run Mer in a Maemo chroot, to get the best of both worlds until Mer has all of the missing low-level pieces (sound, power management, etc). The battery / wlan status applets (probably) won't work if you're booting to Mer instead of chrooting to it, since they depend on Maemo daemons to be running.

EDIT: I've posted the little python programs here, but you need the battery-status package to check your battery, and that probably doesn't work in Mer.