Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there any real alternative?
dm-crypt. (If you look at Wikipedia's crypto-disk-software comparision page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_disk_encryption_s... , you'll see that dm-crypt/cryptsetup/LUKS has pretty much all the features you would care about. Hidden containers would be nice, though.)
But I did some googling before hitting "reply", and apparently you can also mount dm-crypt volumes on windows with FreeOTFE. I guess I should have done some more research before switching.