The following two patches make the SDL display keymapping work correctly when QEMU is executed on Linux, but displayed on an OS-X or Win32 X11 server. As an added bonus, I included support for the SDL Quartz and Win32 video drivers, but I'm not clear if QEMU actually works with them.
The changes are based on code pulled as-is from GTK-VNC / SPICE-GTK which have had good success with this approach. This is in response to this bug report http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2012-01/msg01418.html