the overhead is indeed pretty high if u don't use the hildon bindings at all afterwards. but at least I could find out that pyqt4 for maemo definitely does not support the Q_WS_HILDON option, as described in the qt4hildon wiki. but it has been reported as an enhancement there, so perhaps it will be implemented soon the hint from the developers there was as well to use the /proc directory.

Hope I could help, cheers

daniel