Is it possible to tell Blender to read a panoramic image as if it were pasted on the inside of a cylinder, or do I just apply the panorama to the inside of a cylinder, and flip normals?
Your use of “Backbuff” is confusing.
You can add it as a world texture.
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eureka! thanks fligh% 
Ok, I made a nice panorama render, loaded it into the world, and animated the offset, only my animation came out with a chunky look. The pixels were too big seemingly, so I made a quite large panoramic render, loaded it, and though the effect was reduced, I got basically the same thing. Is there any way to further reduce this effect? I tried turning on antialiasing.
Yes, I think there is a way…
Go to the World buttons and try to give some extra scaling to your texture, with the sizeX, sizeY and sizeZ buttons… Experiment a bit with different values, until you get the best result… High values, scale your texture down… Low values, do the opposite…
One piece of advice don’t overdo it, cause you’ll end up with very “ugly” result (if you scale the texture “down”, too much, the margins of your image texture will be visible on the render…)
Second piece of advise, if you want to have your camera moving, with out the texture moving with it, just add an Empty and use it as the source of the texture’s coordinates (Press the ‘Object’ button and fill in the name of the Object you use at the input button bellow…)…
Good luck… 
Ahhh thanks. I did fool with the size, but the bit about the empty is really interesting. I will fool more with the size too, and see if I can get it right. Seems like there are lots of cool things you can do with the world buttons.