UI Flexibility with Vaadin 7

Me and my team have built what we think is a very nice presentable application with vaadin 6 but feel somewhat disappointed at the UI flexibility and the hard to describe styling complexity of the current stable version. I want to be able to integrate an extensive number of components with other libraries notably JQuery and Prototype as well as several other javascript libraries. How can we use other UI Components in a Vaadin Application and still receive the same event handling support ? Also how easy is it with vaadin 7 to include JS Libraries for advanced logic and animation capabilities?