Welcome to the dark side.... *cue imperial march*
...anyway, dork moment aside, welcome. I'll avoid throwing my opinions on Sense into the mix (don't want to fight), and instead just agree that motoblur is a heap of garbage.
I know you said you tried LauncherPro and found it lacking, but what about LauncherPro Plus? It's $2.99 (that's what I paid at least) and it can look exactly like sense if you wish (you can even download a sense dock, and customize it to behave like the sense dock). It also has several sense-like widgets including messenger, people, calender, and bookmarks. LPP is probably the most advanced launcher available at this point, ADW is a little behind it IMO, but check it out too.
If you absolutely have to have Sense, atm there's only one option. The Droid Incredible is a couple of months old, 3.x" screen, 1ghz snapdragon, HTC phone. And there is that rumored 4.x" HTC phone coming soon, but we don't really know anything about it yet (other than it looks like an enlarged nexus one with a kickstand).
(on a linux note, Gentoo FTW... Fedora if lazy, or it isn't my server. I loved slackware back in the day, 90's, but I switched sometime in early 2000's late 1990's... Jeebus, I'm 27 and sound like an old man... Back in my day, we had to compile our own kernels and fight seg faults, both ways!)