You can still sideload. There homegrown apps housed at xda-devs and probably ppcgeeks too. There are bound to be other sources as well.
Another alternative is to browse the market on your PC at market.android.com and select files to install there, then let them all download at mcdonalds or starbucks or wherever you get free public wifi.
As a possible alternative, you might try this
hack to get the market on a pc emulator, then use
this comment (or
a few just above that) to try and extract an app from the vm for sideloading. I'm not totally sure that will work, but I hope it helps.