Now that hal is out of he portage tree and uninstalled, I've noticed
that the following occur:
1) no battery info (and other ACPI doesn't fare well too)
2) Suspend key is broken; must use $sudo pm-suspend instead
3) USB hotplug is broken; device notifier is oblivious to
inserted/removed USB devices

Solutions?

I have the same problem with my fresh xfce install (I installed gentoo yesterday): no battery info, usb hotplug seems not to work. I've been messing around all day long, but I wasn't able to figure out: my kernel is compiled with the right things enabled, udev is ok, everything is ok. Maybe I'm missing something, but my idea is that it has got to do with the absence of hal.