I just noticed something that I should have included in the original message, part of the "zpool status -v" return:
Code:
errors: Permanent errors have been detected in the following files:
<metadata>:<0x0>
<metadata>:<0x14>
However, all the google returns on this seem to be from people having problems with RAID arrays, and I have only one drive.
I then went ahead and rebooted since nothing else seemed to be leading anywhere; any kind of zfs process just hung the way I indicated before. After rebooting I was able to mount the zfs volume without any difficulty; I could read the directories without incident though didn't try many files.
I then started a scrub, which initially stated it would take ~6hrs - now its looking like closer to 3.