Folks,
PulseAudio crashes in a repeating loop when I manually load the sound driver on this system - why it is not being loaded automatically can be fixed later on. Anyway, removing pulseaudio also removes gnome-bluetooth and bluez due to rpm dependencies that need fixing. I have filed a bug against gnome-bluetooth and asked it not to explicitly want pulseaudio.
The lack of bluetooth isn't really a huge issue :)
Jon.