I'm currently using the Python code to access the VG stuff. Yes, it required some patching but I can do virtually everything with it now.
I had an issue, trying to load a non-square image for this image_demo.py. Sadly this resulted in on screen garbage; it looks like the image data is not aligned. With a bit of fiddling I figured out that a .reshape(h,w) gave me the desired results.
Secondary it seems that the VG stuff with fullscreen images consumes a lot more gpu memory than plain X at the same resolution, is this as expected?