[dhead]

Regarding the issue where the remote volume keys don't repeat, which is apparently an OS-level bug as XBMC doesn't do the repeating itself but relies on the OS to handle this, I wonder if this workaround for Ubuntu can be used with OE?

Raspberry Pi builds doesn't include X.org so this is no go (and this solution only works for keyboards and not for keypress send by lirc).
From a quick googling I guess your remote recognized as keyboard.

Sadly the current state of keyboard support in XBMC is a bit of a mess, with the Raspberry Pi XBMC gets scancodes from the kernel, on OpenELEC x86_64 and i686 from X.Org and on regular Linux distribution from SDL, this is true for Frodo and Gotham.
I've already encountered with the issue you described and more but I didn't thought it worth reporting as the whole keyboard situation seems to me very funny and with Wayland soon on my desktop (Gnome 3.12 next month) I probably will have more issues.

I've been doing a little more testing and I think I know how to solve this.

If I understand correctly when you hold the VolumeUp button the remote send a button hold event and when released the remote sends a release event.
When you hold another button like a "K" the remote will send a press key event (hold and release ?) and repeat again (with some delay) and again until you release the button.

I think that maybe XBMC is relying on SDL and X11 to convert "hold" and "release" events when there is a large delay between them (the button is held) to continuously repeats.
On the Raspberry where no SDL and X11 are use, XBMC gets events from the kernel which doesn't do this conversion.

I'm not sure if it is a good idea to have this issue solved in XBMC, probably better to solve it in external app.
The best suiteable candidate is eventlircd but we will need to code in this feature.
My coding skills are lacking but this is surely my do-it list.