EntityEditorWithPicker rendering

I was working with a custom lookup field type today that renders with a entity editor with picker (like a Person or Group field). I discovered that the required field validation for a SPFieldLookup fieldtype didn't actually seem to work in a dataform web part (I later found out that it works if you do a "Custom List Form" Dataform, I'll post on this later). My workaround was to embed some javascript in the page with the dataform to do some client side validation (because of the way it renders, the asp.net validator in SPD also won't help). I might write up a "how I did it" post on this in detail later, but for now I just wanted to mention an interesting thing I noticed, that the entityeditor actually renders with a bunch of hidden textareas, but the user is actually typing into a contenteditable div!