I've had good success with the advice from this thread

Key things to keep in mind:
1. Create a "corporate" account
2. Set the server as "m.google.com", not the default "gmail.com"
3. The calendar will only sync with your primary google calendar (the first one in the list when you go to the google calendar web page). Other ones will be ignored.

If you decide to go the challenging route of trying to set up an actual google account from advice on xda developers AND can find the latest .apk for the Astrid task manager, then you can also get your google tasks to automatically sync as well. Unfortunately, I went through a lot of steps and can't recall what finally worked. I got a google account option (in addition to the corporate and local), but Market still would not work.