This will be short and sweet.
To work around a race condition (see this thread), LWUIT needs to run on a separate thread on the Blackberry. Taking this into effect, together with a modified LWUIT distribution (removing references to M3G helper classes and the 3D Transition classes), I've finally got the demo to work on a simulator.
Granted, this in the JDE, not NetBeans. I need to figure that...