In case anyone cares, I finally got xorg working. FINALLY. :D

I had some issues with the radeon framebuffer and somehow or another got a reliable desktop experience. This was tough...required some hard reboots. I also had to add a custom boot parameter in yaboot (can't remember off the top of my head). I believe it simply turned off KMS.

In any case, things are moving forward. I'm opting for a simple openbox desktop experience to keep things lightweight.

Once I get gentoo looking and feeling the way that I want, I'll try configuring grub2...because I'm a special kind of masochist, I suppose.