Interesting idea sulu, when X forwarded from a local machine it certainly seems a little quicker than the native browsers.

Regarding the USB; I would err on the side of caution and only have it connected when it's safely planted on a desk, sadly at that point it renders X forwarding moot, as I only plug the N900 into USB when I'm next to a perfectly usable desktop PC or similar. I think the use-case for X forwarding with a browser is to hand-off the CPU load and gain the security of a frequently updated browser.

I have noticed that Luakit (a webkit & lua, w/ vi-binds browser) managed to capture the hardware keyboard of the N900 just fine with no fiddling, I didn't dig around to find why. At this point though it'd require some fettling as fonts were quite small... also Luakit receives infrequent commits, so something to be mindful of.

I think it gets to a stage here of diminishing returns, but interesting to know it can be done.