Thanks to that tutorial I made absolutely sure my starting point was aquifer-free, but I might try with one at some point just for the challenge.
I use Phoebus' Graphics Pack on my 1024x600 netbook and it seems ok, but I'm pretty used to a tiny screen and resolution so it might not be what you're after.
I'm actually building on a pregenerated world right now where there are 2 cliff faces and waterfalls across from each other. Aquifer's are really annoying though.
Do you know of any texture packs that don't make the map 'zoom' level extremely high? Most of the texture packs seem to be made for large and specific resolutions, I play a smaller window mode on mba (1366x768).