With the full authority vested in me as the Debian maintainer of the package ;-)  I can assure you that it is enough of a base to build most (all ?) existing r-cran-* packages into .deb packages.   But that is the R CMD INSTALL step, and as I recall that does not recreate pdf manuals (which are done in R CMD build, or maybe I need more coffee).   So I think a) we're fine and b) as a first pass we should check as we do now with manuals and vignettes but c) we could offer another run_test_full()  [ or some such ] function that does the full Monte.   

By the same token, I also think we could make devtools optional.  We don't always need it, and it pulls in a number of other packages.