Hey, thanks to all the folks, especially Johnx and rm_you, who have pushed a2dp along. I can report pretty much the same as others. Mplayer works great (with my Moto S9) provided I manually set the frequency governor.

The CPU load issue explains the oddity I experienced when I first set up a2dp. Sound worked pretty good for videos with motion and music, but sound broke up horribly during parts with just text and a quiet tone in the background.

For what it's worth, this reminds me of a nasty probblem I have running Vmware on my Linux Thinkpad. Vmare does not properly report its "CPU demand," and thus, the ondemand CPU governor doesn't increase clock speed when the guest OS is under load.

Instead of manually setting the governor, I wonder if it might be possible to run a script that would keep the CPU at its highest setting. I can use something like this on my laptop:
Running the script with a high nice value (19) keeps the CPU at its highest level with a low priority for the loop. For the N810, the problem is that 'nice' doesn't seem to come installed, nor did I find it in a repository (I think I'm missing something here). The advantages to me are that a script like this doesn't require root privileges, and it can be used for a simple wrapper script.