The only reason I mentioned pulling the intake, was that it could have a set of mediocre heads ported to flow like a set of high dollar heads, althoug you may be able to see some porting on the exhaust side and assume the intake side was done as well.
For a VSS I am using a rostra speed control sensor with a magnetic pickup, $23 from summit. There are a few guys successfully using them over on the Binder Bulletin forum for TBI. you can get away without one but thew system runs better with it. I installed mine the other night but haven't got it working yet.