I got the console working perfectly on 8800M GTX with help of uvesafb. It's basically the same card, so I believe it will also solve the problem for you.
Regarding brightness, on my side, the folder is not empty, however:
Code:
gidzzz@GIDZzzHQ:~$ cat /proc/acpi/video/VGA/LCD/brightness
<not supported>
And it's not possible to change the backlight level from software. It would be a nice feature to see, so here comes my bug report.
BTW: Colossal thanks to the devs for finally dealing with PowerMizer!