Genetic differences within European populations

One of the more popular posts on this weblog (going by StumbleUpon and search engine referrers) focuses on genetic variation in Europe as a function of geography. In some ways the results are common sense; populations closer to each other are more genetically related. Why not? Historically people have married their neighbors and so gene flow is often well modeled as isolation by distance. The scientific rationale for these studies is to smoke out population stratification in medical genetics research programs which attempt to find associations between genes and particular diseases. By population stratification I mean the fact that different populations will naturally have different gene frequencies, and if those populations exhibit different frequencies of the disease/trait under investigation then one may have to deal with spurious correlations. If, for example, your study population includes many people of African and European descent, presumably cautious researchers would immediately by aware of this problem and attempt to take it into account. But what about populations which are genetically closer, or whose genetic difference may not be so well manifest in physical characteristics which might clue you in to the issue of stratification?