Emacs is coming. Just yesterday the Emacs devs released the final pre-release version for Emacs 23, the latest Emacs version, which comes with a lot of great improvements) I've compiled the previous pre-release successfully and am just trying to figure out a sensible scheme for a little modularization (so you don't have to get all the docs and elisp source files if you're space is limited).
I may get to making a tcz package of the 'base' part of TeXLive 2008 as well. I don't see why it wouldn't work, since TeXLive contains all of it's own plumbing. You can even run it straight from the DVD, without installing it.)
Of course both of these projects are BIG compared with the core of TinyCore. But Emacs anyway runs fine. And for those with a bit of RAM (a slightly modularized GTK2 version with TTF fonts support and all the bells and whistles will take 256MB or 384MB RAM to load as a tce), it gives a lot of functionality in a hurry. Not to mention the possibility of adding any of hundreds of Emacs extensions.
I know nothing about how necessary sendmail is on a modern Linux system. Certainly the heavyweight mail user agents can be set just to send their mail directly to your ISP's SMTP server, which also solves those funny problems where your mail was sent from you@yourlocalmachinename.com, which could then get rejected downstream.