It's done!  I now finally have ubuntu on my  MacBook Pro(4,1)!  The initial partitioning of my drives (in order to keep my bootcamp'd windows and os x) was made out to be a lot harder than it actually was.  I wasn't quite sure what to do due to the fact that OS X seems very finicky about knowing what is booting from where; and any changes may affect it's need/desire to keep jounaling all drives it knows about.  At any rate, I found an awesome article detailing out all the specifics, as well as how to work around the swap space issue (which i still have yet to tackle!).  With that said, under an hour I think the only thing I don't have working that I'd like, but by no means need, is the keyboard backlight controls and the microphone.

Here's list of things that worked out of the box that I thought wouldn't:

  1. Multitouch Scrolling
  2. Multitouch Clicking (for the right click)
  3. Volume Keys
  4. Restricted Drivers
  5. 90% of the function keys in general (with some help)

So there you have it!  As I figure out more stuff that's wrong, or things to configure, I'm sure i'll be posting more.