On a positive note support for pango in cells just landed in CVS. There will definitely be some performance tuning and some utf8 bugs to work through but a big piece is there.
1.1.7 is also surprisingly stable, we've been kicking the importers and exports around alot and they are in decent shape. Unfortunately it looks like there are still a few gotchas in the gsf OLE export code. libole2 could not read it and XL complains. I'm working to fix it now.