Hmm im on vodafone without a data plan too because i dont browse the net.
A while back i was complaining on mactalk because my phone was using data for no reason. It seemed to stop with recent firmware updates though. You will find apps dont use much data at all. Emails run around 25kb or so. When i use Ozweather it uses about the same.
Tweets dont really require much info to be download, its only a few sentences. It really depends wether you get 5 tweets when you load, or 50 tweets like when i was following the CFA