Alex thanks for a great writeup!
For those of us who like to make our Galileo's do the heavy lifting, building from source is really easy too.
First have an SD image with build tools installed!
Then, from root, only the following commands are needed:
wget http://nodejs.org/dist/v0.10.25/node-v0.10.25.tar.gz
tar -xzf node-v0.10.25.tar.gz
cd node*
./configure
make
make install
This will run for a few hours, error free - and you really feel like the Galileo is doing useful work.