1) The keyboard works fine under the normal "pc" console, but when
      changed to the "virtual terminal" console pressing a key seems
      to return random garbage.  For what it's worth, we tried FreeBSD
      too, and it's virtual console support had the same problem
      (which made it impossible to install, since it uses that for
      it's install program).

This isn't surprising.  I wrote the keyboard initialization code in
pccons.  It's 100% KISS; nothing exciting, no funky tweaks, and the
basic algorithm is about the same as another Major OS.  I didn't write
the keyboard initialization code in pcvt or syscons.  B-)

   2) The laptop has an "IBM Trackpoint", a sort of replacement mouse.
      It is supposed to be fully PS/2 Bus mouse compliant (and all the
      DOS programs we ran see it as such), however NetBSD's PS/2 mouse
      driver does not find it at all.  We even tried the other Bus
      mouse drivers with no luck.  

The `pms' driver's probe routine was seriously broken in 1.0.  I'm not
sure in retrospect how it managed to work on any machine, except by
pure luck of timing.  The version in -current should work better.