The whole pnd system is not too magical .. its open sourced, and depends on pretty common linux stuff. It builds out of the box on most distros, and takes not too much effort to integrate.
The challenge mainly is in library versioning .. ie: applciations built for Pandora have a certain ABI and library version assumption; if your native distro is different assumptions, you may need to roll in a lot of extra to support _pnds_ (existing ones.)
ie: Supporting the pnd system is easy; supporting existing made pnds, that can be effort.
Ex: If you're running an x86 distro, then supporting pnd is trivial, but supporting existing Pandora pnds, probabyl a pita

(ARM based, different control assumptions..)
But if you're running Debian on Pandora instead of normal firmware, then adding pnd support is not too hard ,and getting average ond-files to run implies having a lot of lib versions and same ABI setup.
jeff