I would toss out the idea that we take a look at using the current background with crystal windeco and keramik style as the default. It would turn a lot of heads out of the box and really give TDE a much different default look than KDE (a much improved look -- in my opinion) <snip>
I don't think using the default style of KDE 3.1 would give TDE a much different default look than KDE :D IMHO I would suggest defaulting to QtCurve or Domino (with a light colorscheme, not the default grey one), but I don't know if they are integrated now.