Exactly. I can point my Blades to any other pool, be it one with a getwork interface, or any stratum pool via a stratum proxy, and guess what? It works. ONLY p2pool shit's it's lips when presented an ASICMiner (or KnC it seems).
You actually can't. You need to use a proxy. Otherwise the broken blade firmware will flood the pool with invalid getwork responses because it ignores the target difficulty. Some pools will ban you for this, perhaps most won't but it's still flooding them with bogus work.
The asicminer firmware is broken in a lot of ways. It's workable, but not good. ... and you can still use it with P2Pool, you just need to tell p2pool that this POS is going to return difficulty 1 no matter what.