Device detection was one of the stumbling blocks I was hitting, especially as it doesn't mount as a disk. That's what got me thinking along the lines of accessing over the network instead.
Here's the best description I've found so far:
http://wikee.iphwn.org/usb:usbmux
Here are some open source projects that have some detection routines along with filesystem manipulation that can be checked out:
http://code.google.com/p/manzana/
http://code.google.com/p/independence/
I'll keep digging.