Nobody here has heard of this Red Hat Ready stuff, although it sounds like a 3rd
party channel candidate. Can you elaborate?

I'm terribly sorry no one at yoru company was able to inform you.  Red Hat 
Ready certification is a product offered by Red Hat, Inc.; the folks in 
Technical Support in the Raleigh Office are generally "in charge" of it and 
provide most of the effort, IIRC.  Chris Kloiber and Rob Landry, currently.

You can get an overview of the hardware certification program at:
http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/

You can see the Red Hat Ready certification overview at:
http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/?pagename=redhatready

You can see the downloads of the RPMs I suggested are "up2date-able" at:
http://hardware.redhat.com/hcl/?pagename=files

Any chance this may get implemented in the RHEL4 timeframe so those of
us running certification tests can get latest-and-greatest upgrades of
the test suites and supporting tools via RHN?

Seeing how I just pulled down the latest cert-suites from my RHN account, I'll
consider this enhancement request "implemented well enough to close" :)