I haven't been following this thread, but you just don't need to spoof iPhone to make tear do a great job rendering gMail. Get rid of the iPhone user id and use this URL with tear's standard user id:
It would be great to add any additional Tear-specific tips we discovered there. It would also be great to have a wiki page for alternate URLs for some of these common sites like GMail, Hotmail, Google Reader, etc. This has been coming up frequently recently.