@tdm: I'm not sure what changes you made to gapps, but in my builds, if you start from a full wipe/format of boot, system, data, and cache, once you start up ICS, it downloads all your market apps automatically. With your alpha7 (not sure about previous alphas), I get no google account sync on apps?
I believe this has to do with your workaround for including gapps. I don't pre-include, and the gapps setup seems to initiate the google backup process to automatically restore market apps on my builds.
Edit: I wonder if it has something to do with the new Play?