Good news for those like me (not looking for an easy way :-) messing with their units just for the sake of hacking. I was able to build the distro this weekend with the latest kernel, after applying patches I found on http://archlinuxarm.org
As I don't feel like having my 2T hard drives full of music and movies reformated and planning to use my USB port for the multimedia, being an old school *nix die-hard, I used root=/dev/nfs on my Fedora workstation to simplify build-install-test-reboot cycle (great help). So I'm yet to try flashing it to NAND (shouldn't be an issue) and maybe even flashing the u-boot itself, which was built OK as well. But for now things are looking great.