I've tried this again with the latest 0.4.0 build and found that after booting the OSX disc 1 [panther] image as a cdrom and using it's disk utility to partition the hdd drive image, that initially as per previously, the disk would be red exclamation marked out with a warning that osx could not be installed to the selected disk as it was not bootable [or something like that].
But after quitting the installer which also quits pearpc, then relaunching pearpc, the disk was now blessed with a green arrow when I clicked on it and the install worked 100% from that point on and pearpc was happy to boot that hdd image once the install was complete :)
This has shaved many! hours off the process of getting osx up and running.