.. or should I say, 'sarge' rocks :)
Roughly an 8 hour install. Used synaptic to upgrade to a 2.6.8 kernel-image, and everything just works. I'm in the process of install loads of CPAN distros now and pretty soon I expect to have a working laptop again.
The install process was actually better than Ubuntu, and it even managed to find, configure and use all the network hardware without any intervention from me. The battery monitor still doesn't appear to work, but apart from that, everything seem to be in order.
Thanks to thinc for the suggestion of trying the netinst version of Debian.
