An update on this:
I've been messing about with an Arduino Makefile for a bit with and have had varying results -- my biggest problem being a failure to compile via make where the sketch builds fine in the Arduino IDE.
However, I am now happy to say I've found a *brilliant* alternative IDE/toolchain solution which is not as full-on as XCode or MSVS or any of the industrial strength dev environments, but its sexy enough to give syntax highlighting, code completion, etc etc in a nice, clean, programmer-friendly editor with integration to SVN, git, etc as well as full in-IDE build, upload and serial monitor support.
It works a treat on my Mac, and quite happy with both the editor and the plug-ins.. Downside? 70USD for a licence for ST2 -- money well spent in my mind, but might be prohibitive otherwise.... ST2 builds exist for Wintel and Linux too, so should also work there but YMMV...
Brad