What you need to do is install all of the prerequisites manually, turn UAC off and then follow these instructions for getting it set up on Windows 7: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee554869.aspx

You do need to be careful about the Windows Features though, as the package manager script listed on MSDN will not install the necessary .NET 3.5 features:

Before you can run up Central Administration, or any other SharePoint sites however, you will need to change the .NET Framework version to v2.0

Open up IIS Manager by hitting start and then typing inetmgr then hit enter.  You then need to expand application pools and right click on the app pool you want to change (all SharePoint App Pools will need to run under version 2.0.50727) and click basic settings:

Once there, change the app pool from v4.0 to v2.0:

 After you've got it all up and running, you can then create SharePoint projects in Visual Studio, and use it for prototyping and playing around.  I still haven't managed to get the SharePoint PowerShell cmdlets to work as yet, since PowerShell runs against the v4 framework.  If anyone has any hints about this, then please let me know!

SharePoint 2010 Troubleshooting TechEd 2011.pdf

TechEd 2011.zip

One of the issues with the scripts as they were, was that when trying to add custom user profile properties (at the point where we would try to get the UserProfileManager), we got the nice indicative error: "No User Profile Application available to service the request. Contact your farm administrator."  After a quick search, I came up with this post by Steve Peschka that hit the nail on the head: http://blogs.technet.com/b/speschka/archive/2010/02/22/no-user-profile-application-available-mystery-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx  Basically, the account the script is running as needs to be added to the Service Application's Administrators permssion, and also granted the Full Control permission under Permissions.  (Yes, both locations)

My next question was: "Great!  How do I do this in Powershell?"

More not-quite-so-quick searching revealed some code written by Charlie Holland:  http://www.chaholl.com/archive/2011/02/10/programmatically-configure-service-application-permissions-in-sharepoint-2010.aspx  He had coded up an example in C#, but it was up to me to turn this into Powershell, which wasn't easy for me, so I decided to share the code for this wherever I can, including this blog.  :)

$UserProfileApp = Get-SPServiceApplication -Name "User Profile Service"
 New-SPProfileServiceApplicationProxy -Name "User Profile Service Proxy" -ServiceApplication $UserProfileApp -DefaultProxyGroup

 ## Set permissions to the User Profile Application so that we can add user properties to it later...
 
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint")
 
$spFarm = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm]::Local
 $mgr = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Claims.SPClaimProviderManager]::Local
 $claim = $mgr.ConvertIdentifierToClaim($config.Farm.RemoteConnection.Username, [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.Claims.SPIdentifierTypes]::WindowsSamAccountName)
 $spAclAccessRule = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.AccessControl.SPAclAccessRule``1]
 
$security = $UserProfileApp.GetAccessControl()
 $spIisWebAppRights = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.AccessControl.SPIisWebServiceApplicationRights]
 $aclAccessRule = $spAclAccessRule.MakeGenericType($spIisWebAppRights)
 $actualAccessRule = New-Object($AclAccessRule) $claim, "FullControl"
 $security.AddAccessRule($actualAccessRule)
 
$UserProfileApp.SetAccessControl($security)
 
$security = $UserProfileApp.GetAdministrationAccessControl()
 $spCentralAdminRights = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.AccessControl.SPCentralAdministrationRights]
 $aclAccessRule = $spAclAccessRule.MakeGenericType($spCentralAdminRights)
 $actualAccessRule = New-Object($AclAccessRule) $claim, "FullControl"
 $security.AddAccessRule($actualAccessRule)
 
$UserProfileApp.SetAdministrationAccessControl($security)
 
$UserProfileApp.Uncache()

- Brendan Law