Retropie

[Luke]

In a layman's terms I think you are correct, yes - the drivers are there but not usable with longsleep's kernel. Estimate - nope / hope - absolutely yes / wild guess - I would be surprised if it would happen this month and would be surprised if it didn't happen in the next 3 months.

Here's what I don't get though -- must Allwinner provide the kernel? The drivers are a binary blob, right? Akin to, say, many wifi drivers out there, or various other graphics drivers. Why must we wait for a special kernel? What's the difference between Mali's drivers and, say, AMD's proprietary drivers, that makes the latter usable with any old kernel but the former not?

Thanks for the patience and the hard work! My pine is yet to come, but I'm oh so excited

I'm no expert in this matter - think you may want to wait for someone like Lenny or Xalius to answer this for you in full. You may also want to follow this thread. But as I understand it - no, we are not waiting for allwinner to deliver a kernel - we are waiting for them to deliver binary blobs that will work with what we already have. 
Keeping my fingers crossed that your pine is delivered soon