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The bug I’ve talked about in my last post, and described in Debian ticket #567245 has been fixed in grub-pc 1.98~20100128-1.2. From the changelog:

grub2 (1.98~20100128-1.2) unstable; urgency=low

* Non-maintainer upload.
* Stop setting gfxpayload=keep (closes: #567245).
– Julien Cristau <jcristau@debian.org>  Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:37:51 +0100

There is also an interesting message in the discussion concerning the related Debian ticket #567393:

Previously grub2 defaulted to start linux in text mode unless VESA graphics mode was explicitly requested. Recently we changed to defaulting to generic framebuffer when its support is enabled in linux.
I found 3 problems:
1) At least some KMS modules expect graphics card to be in text mode. It would be kernel-side problem since on some firmware types this mode isn’t easily or sometimes isn’t at all available. On the other hand it’s useful to be able to tell grub2 to start in text mode even if generic framebuffer is supported by kernel. I added this ability to mainstream grub. To use it add:
GRUB_GFXPAYLOAD_LINUX=text
to /etc/default/grub
2) generic framebuffer expects size in bytes and not 64KiB blocks. I fixed it in mainstream
3) intelfb expects handover only from vesa. Attached patch to linux may help.

None of 3 changes I mentioned is packaged in debian yet.