Just reporting some more issues I discovered after more tinkering:

1. As noted in OP, keyboard input is impossible - but only in SOME games. I have tried 7 games so far including the default 3, and so far only 2 games refused to accept keyboard input: the default "tutorial" game, and "Ripples" (http://www.sakevisual.com/ripples.html). I haven't been able to quite tell what it is about these two games that make them different. Could it be a version thing? I know Ripples is probably the newest game I tried..

2. Even for the games that accept keyboard input, some critical shortcuts are not possible on the N900. For example - bringing up the game menu. There is no "esc" key on the N900 and neither is right click possible to the best of my knowledge - making saving game impossible on games that don't expose UI buttons to activate the game menu. Stuff like page-up to go back to the previous line is also impossible due to lack of a page-up key.

Point 1 might be a porting bug, but upstream might want to take note of point two since "missing key" issues like these are bound to pop up in any possible future ports to other mobile platforms too.

A hackaround I did for point 2 was to change the default key bindings by directly editting /opt/renpy/renpy/config.py. This works as long as the game actually accepts keyboard input in the first place. I have the editted version attached in case anyone might want it - it allows you to hit 'g' to launch the game menu and hit 'p' to roll back to the previous line.