The Honeycomb docs are vague:
When the hardware-accelerated renderer is enabled, most operations in Canvas, Paint, Xfermode, ColorFilter, Shader, a
I'm working on getting a complete list published. The features not supported are:
Edit: Read this article to know everything there is to know about hardware acceleration in Android 3.0.
However, what you are describing should work just fine. All gradients are supported, as well as all blending modes. Please report bugs with reproducible test cases for any issue you encounter and I'll get them fixed.