Out of interest, to see how easy it would be to use the iphone 4g connection, I used gnome-session in corepure64, i.e.
$ tce-load -i graphics-KERNEL gnome-session usbmuxd xdg-user-dirs
$ xdg-user-dirs-update
$ sudo /usr/local/etc/init.d/dbus start
$ sudo /usr/local/etc/init.d/networkmanager start
$ startx
After disabling the iphone wifi, enabling the personal hotspot and connecting the usb cable, I got the trust message and, after answering "OK", things connected automagically without the need for any further commands
I'm far from being a fan of gnome bloat, but that was reasonably impressive..