I may be out of line here, but "disklabel -e sd1" by itself 
   without the -r or -R protofile worked for me under NetBSD 1.1. It 
   created a ficticous label w/ the correct geometry, dropped me into vi, 
   so I could edit the partitions in a civilized manner w/o the need for 
   creating an entry in disktab. Is this a bug, or a feature of 1.1?

That's what's supposed to happen.  If there's no label, a default one
is created for you.