Speaking of avoiding blobs: I have a reasonably recent ATI Radeon and it mostly works with the newish R300 driver in Mesa/Xorg 3.9/7.0. It's about half as fast as the fglrx driver and doesn't seem to support some advanced features and there is some glitchy behavior. However, it's good enough to play ppracer, Cube, Warzone, Celestia, ... There's a funky texture issue in Celestia but I think it's fixed in Mesa HEAD. Nexuiz doesn't work quite right. The UT2004 demo is slow but playable.
The card model is: AGP ATI Radeon 9800 Pro with 128MB VRAM

I'm very pleased with the driver and I'm thinking of writing a letter (on paper! the horror!) to ATI and tell them why the 9800 is a sure buy next time I need a card. I hope they don't go out of stock...