Well, my tower system arrived on friday, and I expect to play with it. It doesn't look like it (or at any rate the OSBDM hi-touch interface, and the compiler) has much support for linux, and even less for MacOS, where I do most of my playing. That's a shame. Perhaps my initial contribution can be an ethernet or serial bootloader and instructions for using gcc on mac to develop code for it.
The chip used only contains half of the ethernet required (it has a MAC, you need to use an external PHY chip to get full communications.) This is somewhat annoying, since PHY chips seem to come in packages even more nasty to deal with than the QFP80/0.65 package that the cpu comes in. No USB on this one either. There are some other coldfire chips with ethernet and usb and V2 cores, but it looks like the current consumption goes up to less reasonably levels (300mA+ vs about 75mA for the CPU used on the tower...)