After several bugs fixed and lots of debugging, I can say now PulseAudio should be working almost perfectly (still some problems with stuttering sound on low-end machines) in openSUSE 11.0. So, here’s a summary of the things we have done, which I should have bloged about before.
First, we tried to replace the GNOME-upstream volume control with padevchooser (a system tray icon that gives access to all PulseAudio tools), but people complained loudly about the difficulty of just setting the volume with this, they just wanted a volume slider. So, we got back to the upstream volume applet, but changed it to open the PulseAudio volume control instead of gnome-volume-control.
Another problem we found early was PA not working correctly on 5.1 (or other) speaker setups. There was an easy fix, just changing the number of channels in the config file, but there was no GUI, so we added one to paprefs:
With this, you can now control all your speakers individually:
Apart from that, we had to tweak ALSA and SDL configurations to just use PulseAudio when on GNOME, since KDE is not using it, but I think everything should now be ok.