Luck would have it that the good folks at Broken Kode issued a version of their killer Manji template with a sidebar built in.  The new template is called Rin and is easily skinnable if you’re familiar with CSS and willing to experiment with hacking the PHP. 

I had tried to shoe horn in a sidebar myself, but I was never happy with the results.  (Blockquotes were particularly wonky.) With the sidebar working, I’ve restored the "most recent comments" list with the help of a nifty plugin.  WordPress just keeps getting better.  If you’re thinking about making a switch from some other blog software, I highly recommend it.

UPDATE: Added some more stuff to the sidebar: an add for some tasteless swag I made and a list of the most popular posts.