So, i had a productive IRC chat this morning with Tackat, who introduced me to
Marble.
Marble is part of kde-edu, and can be built either as a KDE4 application, or just
as a standalone QT application. It runs very nicely on Solaris with QT 4.3.0:
marble-screenshot-0
marble-screenshot-1
marble-screenshot-2
marble-screenshot-3
Marble isn't just a desktop app. It is also a QT designer plugin:

