I vote for Better Terminal, Astro, the standard 'useful' stuff...
Also, if you could make sure the kernel you provide has working ramconsole and that the eclair.user.rc has the "echo 2 >" line necessary for adb out-of-the-box, that'd be great. What lcd.density are you gonna build for?
Would love to see stinebd's WiFi / bluetooth tethering (fixed for XDA):
http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...postcount=5096
http://xdandroid.southcape.org/xdandroid-tether.apk
It will require the latest rootfs & kernel for the IP / NAT modules & rules...
In general I prefer sleek and fast to over-featured. Which is why I run OMJs Sense 2.1 on WM6.5, and am planning to stick with Donut on the Diamond if I can fix some of the bugs. I presume you're going with 2.0.1 / eclair? It could still be real fast if you tweak enough. Good luck, can't wait to see what you've got coming!
PS. You may also want to confer with #htc-linux peeps to see if you can't get the /etc/ppp/pap-secrets stuff working for US cellular people, it's likely they're gonna fix that so you can set user & pass in the APN settings GUI (right now they're ignored, and people have to build that file by hand) but I dunno how soon... would be cool if that worked in your release.
PPS. I get about 4-6hrs battery life from full charge on my Diamond with no use, looking at my dmesg with pm & irq debug on it seems the vast majority of my suspend calls fail... waking up MUCH sooner than the "Wake up in ## seconds" indicates was intended. Seems to be a pretty general diam500 problem. You make any progress on that front?