My take on your questions, in some cases more helpfully than in other
cases:

1. Others have talked about this. I'll leave it to them.  If they don't
   comment, then go check google.  I understand that it works well.

2. On every system where I've tried to boot headless, BIOS refuses to
   boot.  I've heard claims about mythical BIOS options to support
   this, but haven't been able to find it in my systems' BIOS settings.
   (NetBSD also runs on hardware that lacks graphical displays, I
   believe...(^&)  You may have to enable serial boot-blocks on the
   i386 port.

   Put another way, in my tests I've run, I've *never* had a problem
   here with NetBSD...(^&  (BIOS refuses to get past self-test.)

2. Last I checked, NetBSD did not require swap space if you have
   sufficient RAM.  (But the new agressive buffering might be an
   issue..?  Perhaps you should limit the amount of buffering.)

3. I'll skip this one.  (^&

4. I suggest *trying* it, if it's not too inconvenient to do so.
   I assume that you have sample hardware, so using your own CF
   card would be easy, yes?  You also said that these people used
   "their OS".  You might point out that NetBSD is maintained by
   a group of people already (not cost to your customer), and if
   your customer *really* wants to customize NetBSD, they can do
   so without the restrictive GPL or LGPL forcing them to divulge
   trade secrets to competitors.

4. Why are there two number 2s?  In any single episode of The Prisoner,
   there was only 1 number 2 at any given time (sort-of exceptions
   can be seen in a few cases, but I reject them as true counter-examples).

5. No more insane than anyone else trying any other OS for this,
   I suspect.  (^&

-- 
  "I probably don't know what I'm talking about."  http://www.olib.org/~rkr/