Multiple Partitions: Updated Info/Advice for Lion & Win7?

I have a new MacBook Pro that came with Lion. I'm a Linux user with a fair amount of Windows experience, but this is my first Mac. I want to set up alternate operating systems (MacOSX, Win7, Linux) that can be booted either in Parallels or bare-metal. I also want to have a separate user-data partition for each OS. I'm slowly figuring out the GPT / MBR / Hybrid MBR stuff, but I can't quite get things the way I want them, and reinstalling OSes over and over is getting to be time-consuming! So: can anyone offer advice for what works on Lion? (For example, I tried rEFIt a couple of times, but it just hung my Mac and broke whatever booting I was able to do up to then!)

For concreteness' sake, here's what I'd like to do:

Part 0=MacOSX-System
Part 1=MacOSX-UserData
Part 2=Win7-System
Part 3=Win7-UserData
Part 4=Linux-System
Part 5=Linux-UserData
Part 6=Linux-Swap (maybe?)

My best result so far has been with GPT partitions created by MacOSX Disk Utility, Win7 installed in one, bare-metal boot selection by holding Option on startup. Win7 also ran under Parallels 6. However, I couldn't figure out how to get Win7-UserData to be visible when running Win7 as a guest OS.

Also, Linux (Ubuntu-10.04) bare-metal install seems to work OK (it sees the previously-set-up partitions and installs into them) but I don't know what to do about the bootloader (GRUB? GRUB2? LILO? rEFIt doesn't work for me.) So after the apparently-successful install, I can't select the OS from a bare-metal Option-key boot.

Specific questions:

* Is the Option-key boot in Lion really a multi-system bootloader, as it appears? Are there docs about it somewhere?

* Can Win7 use GPT properly, or do I still have to worry about hybrid MBRs for that?

* Can I get OSX to set up the small RecoveryHD partition somewhere specific on the main drive? It would be nice to have that partition available, but the Make Recovery Disk utility seems to want to put it on an external drive, and the version that gets sometimes gets created when you install Lion on the main disk seems to be on an automagically-created partition with space stolen from the main install partition.

Thanks!