duh. we definitely need the 'include' directory when building an app that depends on Qt. i was doing 'git add' selectively last week, to see about upload times, and i had forgotten this folder
i had accidentally gotten all the Qt mac binaries linked against '/sw/lib' (from fink project), which would NOT WORK if shipped to customers that way. see changes in this file: macosx/mkspecs/qmodule.pri