Is it common to access data on a Hadoop system with SQL syntax? I haven't encountered a method like that yet. Where should I look?

they mentioned that they're open sourcing their system at some point soon.

Any hackers have deployed hadoop themselves? How much of a pain is it?

There isn't any pain. Best of all it's easy to setup hadoop on a single machine, or two machines here and there and then them into a large cluster:

Here's a good tutorial that may help: http://www.michael-noll.com/wiki/Running_Hadoop_On_Ubuntu_Li...

(If you're using a Linux machine just follow that; otherwise get VMWare running Ubuntu and set it up there).