Cranium:
I think with this configuration, you will only be able to control colors every 3rd LED rather than every LED as with the strips on Adafruit. The LEDs on each side of the 8806 appear to be in series with an additional resistor for each to drop voltage further. The max power dissipation of the 8806 is 600mW so with 6 RGB LEDs, it would be able to supply a maximum of only 6.7mA to each leg of each LED. This coincides with the 180 ohm resistors for the green and blue legs in the pics. These resistors would limit current to around 6mA for each color. This would mean it would not be as bright as the strip on Adafruit that can supply the full rated 20mA to each leg of each LED.But this is all based on looking at the photos and my limited knowledge of these things. You won't really know until you hook it up and find out.
Please post a follow up on this.
More knowledge than me, that's for sure!
The power sockets have arrived, and after killing one (I don't think I could solder to save my life) it's alive. I followed the ladyada.net tutorial for the LPD8806 and it works, with a minor adjustment.
As you surmised, the LEDs are unfortunately controlled in batches of three rather than individually. 
With this strip there are 10 segments. Each segment has 18 LEDs, but as they're controlled in groups of 3, that means there are essentially 6 pixels/segment. So you need to:
LPD8806 strip = LPD8806(60, dataPin, clockPin)
to control the entire length of the strip in the way that you would expect.
So not exactly what I was after (I still don't have the spec sheet), but it's 1/3rd the cost of the adafruit strip, is good enough for what I want, and gives me a relatively easy way to control the colours using the LPD8806 library.
I hope this is of some use to someone!