Will you be interested in trying to get the Netbook Edition desktop running? I just have thought about that for two weeks now, and I cant get it out of my head how awesome it would be if in fact it worked well, seeing that the LXDE which has a similar layout to Gnome runs well, I dont see how it would not function relatively mostly as expected.
EDIT: Also I see in the link in your sig that gnome seems to looks nice too on the small screen