Oktane: "It would be extremely easy to build hardware to decode the Vss signal and output it as an ASCII value for an RS-232 port. I could do the hardware in a few hours."

That'd be fantastic! Maybe with a switch for 4 vs. 8 pulses per revolution? Well, that may better be implemented on the software side, of course. This would be such a cool feature with a lot of potential 'customers'. I'm sure we could find a nice coder to write a kernel hack for it, once the hardware is there! (With some help on how to do something like that, I may be able to do it - but I bet there'll be someone much better than me around).
Would you be willing to post instructions on how to build a little device like that?