Entirely custom UI for an Android device

My goal is to create a custom ROM for commodity Android tablet hardware. It won't use the normal Android UI widgets, but just a simple launcher that offers a custom email app, a news app, and maybe a handful of other things. Each icon won't be small, as in the normal Android launcher, but rather a full half or quarter of the screen.

What would be the best way to go about this? Could I create a custom ROM that does nothing but start up and launch a stripped-down browser process that loads web pages from the local drive? Would that be a good option?

I'm also considering a development machine. G1s are plentiful and well-supported, as are M001s. If I had a custom ROM that worked on a test machine, what kind of work would be needed to get it working on a different hardware platform?

I appreciate开发者_运维百科 any input you can offer.

Some thoughts:

1. Look at ASOP and what devices it supports and get that device as test machine.
2. You only need to customize one main default android app to give you the launch screen you want...the HomeScreen application..sample is in the examples of the SDk..