The .htaccess that get installed in blah/gallery/ is for some reason blank. On one of my computers, I have gallery installed, and .htaccess is not blank. I just installed gallery on a new computer and it is not blank. Also, we shouldn't tell the user to create a directory called blah/gallery/albums, because the default location is blah/gallery/../albums. ie. /var/www/sitename.com/htdocs/gallery and /var/www/sitename.com/htdocs/albums NOT /var/www/sitename.com/htdocs/gallery/albums Personally, the former is prefered over the latter. The gallery directory is expendable, if a user rm -rf's it, it's no big deal. Unless their albums are inside it of course....
Even after running the setup wizard, it adds some text into .htaccess, but just comments. It says, BEGIN gallery section, and END gallery section, and a few other comments and that's about it. I'm not sure what has changed here. My .htaccess file on a different server has all the proper Overrides, the mod_rewrite stuff, the magic_quotes_gpc stuff, etc...
gallery ebuilds don't install a custom .htaccess file. Fixed postinstall instructions.