Ok thanks so much for everyone who replied so far. I have put together the following list of 35 (oops 38) based on the highly arbitrary and unscientific method of eyeballing the responses and seeing which improvements are mentioned most.

So... if I could ask for some further assistance it would be nice to rank this list in order of importance/popularity. Also, if we could put together general info for us noobs on where to get theses apps (for those not in the garage anyways) that would be great.

And of course the list is open source so subtractions/additions are welcome

1. Install Simple Brightness App
2. Install cpumem-applet
3. Install callnotify
4. Install Autodisconnect
5. Install AdBlock Plus and adflashblock-css
6. Install Extra Decoders Support
7. Install FM Radio Player and fm-boost
8. Install headphone daemon
9. Install rootsh
10. Install kernel-power-settings and use "ideal" (warning: This voids your warranty)
11. fMMS
12. VIM
13. Angry Birds
14. Conky
15. Battery eye or battery graph
16. Additional audio codecs
17. Extra profiles for sound
18. Call forwarding applet
19. Vertsms
20. Live wallpaper
21. Desktop Activity Manager
22. Overclock Kernel (Lehtos 900mhz so stable!)
23. fMMS
24. Petrovich
25. PicoDrive & DrNokSnes (Megadrive / SNES Emulator)
26. Firefox Mobile Beta
27. Conky
28. Easy Debian!
29. Petrovich
30. Free Office Viewer
31. Mobile TV
32. Healthcheck
33. Recaller (This is awesome!)
34. Joikuspot
35. Hermes Sync
36. Media Box
37. Pianobar
38. Catorise

Thanks again everyone!