I had planned on building some extra functionality into jQPie to fit certain needs but after playing with Ext and its jQuery support all my needs have been met.
A basic example of the paging/data grid module running off php, works pretty nice.
http://projects.cyberlot.net/jqpie/examples/paging.html
I will be working on putting together demos and examples on using jQPie, jQuery and Ext together.
The above page is just a quick thrown together example to figure out the php side of things I plan a new release soon with full example code.