I was half asleep by the time I wrote that last night, so, some additional info...

Openvpn itself seems to be working fine. I accidentally clicked on the .p12 file and was surprised to find that it opened. The N800 treated it as a normal cert, asked for some passwords and I guess stored it. I could see this being a problem or a solution.... if I could convince openvpn to use it as stored on the device that would work. I've tried commenting it out of the ovpn file and it just tells me that it needs a key, basically.

I took a closer look at my Ipcop settings, and it seems to favor this auth method. Admittedly I don't know a ton about vpn, but I didn't see any option to key it a different way. I'm sure I could convince it at the command line or something, but I've had success with this auth type on "normal" systems, it doesn't seem too much of a stretch to have it work on the n800, especially since it was able to load the cert by itself.