Dan, thanks a million for doing this - I tried the earlier versions of JBoss AS 7 on Fedora but at that time the permissions was so bad I couldn't even run AS7 as root ;) and haven't had time since to try it.
You suggestion about using management API is fine, but will not happen as long as AS7 management API does not provide a way to do incremental updates (i.e. update jsf, html etc.) and if you have a 10-20 mb EAR you have to upload that constantly - it would make the iterative development experience rather bad. Thus we have not focused on this usecase.
What you can do is open the server editor and click the "Deployment" tab - here you can see it has three options:
Deploy to AS7 (the default)
Deploy to Workspace (will be stored inside eclipse workspace)
Deploy to custom location (you decide where it goes)
If the two last options are greyed out for you then it is because you are using an older version of JBoss Tools which did not talk to the management interface to add custom locations - since Beta2 that should though happen. I recommend you try with Beta3.
Let me know how that goes.
p.s. its a shame Fedora doesn't allow you to run AS7 as a user so you can identify the secret key that would avoid having to add a management user ;(