Are these things driven by simply mounting the devs in the dock?
yeah pretty much. As far as I remember docking stations, if the docking station uses industry standard chipsets to get deliver functionality via a bunch of I/O ports (sound, nic, video in/out, serial usb, parallel, firewire) then you should be OK since the Linux kernel has loads of support for well known devices. Hotplug should be able to "discover" the new devices. If they use unknown chipsets or poor/no documented chipsets (*ick* Boroadcom) then you will have some difficulties.