Thanks for the feedback!
Things could be easier with a DVCS as I could just push the Waf branch to Launchpad. We really must release soon :)
I could use some guidance about some of the more arcane things in the Autotools system: e.g. 'binary relocation' and what is it supposed to do.
As for OS X, what were the specific issues? It looks like Waf has built in support for 'frameworks' (though I don't know what they are), which can be used in a cross-platform way as uselib variables. It's also easy to add platform-specific snippets using simple ifs.
Regards, Krzysztof