Tim,
Let us look into this more. I developed the Twitter Channel interface over a year ago. At the time, it wasn't possible to use the API (easily) to fetch public Twitter streams. There were various roadblocks in both their API and terms of service to do so.
I think it would be a great feature to have though, so this is something I'll look into more. I definitely wasn't trying to shoot you down when you asked, just didn't think it was possible. We just released JFBConnect v7. A lot of our efforts are on that release right now to bug-squash and start promotions, but I"ve added this to our to-do list to investigate for an upcoming release. We have the code for reading from a stream, so reading from another *shouldn't* be that difficult, but I know it was before. Let's hope that's changed. If so, we'll definitely try to get this an upcoming (hopefully the next) release.
Thanks,
Alex