Alsa is all nice and so but it's harder to set up than using OSS (or what the in-kernel-stuff is named :) I think it would be better to default to not using ALSA and tell users during installation that if they want ALSA they should add alsa to USE.
ok, I removed alsa from our recommended USE vars in make.conf on cvs. I'm forwarding this to g2boojum just so he can verify that the desktop config doc doesn't assume that alsa is in USE. I doubt it, but just being careful here :)
Docs checked; they're fine wrt alsa and oss.