Hi Rwhitby...great things you are doing. I too am trying get a unlocked GSM Palm Pre here in France. It doesn't look like it's going to happen soon. I'd prefer a QWERTY keyboard but at this point, I'd make do with anything.
I made this
thread to try to sort out all possible (legal) ways to obtain an unlocked handset. I just added a link to the first post to a German article that says the OS version on the GSM version doesn't let you manually set up the data connection, and the pre-configuration of known networks was not only for local providers, but mostly not working.
Can you bring your magic to fixing that little problem?