Hi there.
I kind of forgot about this post, but a very helpful admin from another school actually called and gave me a couple of hints for capser - as he's been using in for a while. He pointed out that Google actually run an exchange-like sync functionality. That way, we can push out an Exchange Active-sync profile to our iPads, and it works like an exchange account.
The info can be found at http://support.google.com/a/users/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=138740
Essentially, set the server address as m.google.com
set the username as the full email address
set the domain as the email domain (everything after the @ symbol).
Then, once they've installed the profile, they put in their google password and away they go, easy!
Hope that helps!