Ok, so we've convinced our boss to let us get CF 7.02 (mainly so we can get our hands on Flex based apps, of course)
After banging away over the weekend, things are starting to fall into place.

Some thoughts:

1. If you're going to play with Flex, just look for a tutorial on www.mikebritton.com. It's very short, but gets across the basic idea of getting data from a CFC. (The Adobe book I got about Flex seems more geared toward the UI perty stuff, and less about the backend data related items. Kinda frustrating.)
2. Oh my. States states states. Still playing around with these, and transitions. Yes, yes yes!
3. Datagrids sort nicely. They improved these from Flash, apparently. Very neat.