So I've probably done about a day and a half's work on it since the first post above, and I seem to have motivation to continue for now; but I also discovered (after using khteditor), Khertan has a bitcoin client for Sailfish/Meego, and wondering if it might be portable to Maemo without too much effort. Its on github so am going to check into that, or see if I can grab some ideas from it.

(link to github source via Khertan's projects page at http://khertan.net/ )