Using the extra lcd.init(...) line, I have also gotten my LCD to work, but it runs very slowly (the letters in the first line of the hello world example is shown very slowly one at a time), but I have text on the display which I did not have before I added the extra line.
I have also looked a bit in the underlaying code, and to me it looks like this exact same call is made during the initialization, which makes me wonder what's going wrong. Is it an issue with the constructor being executed too early in the process before the pin control is fully operational?
/Thomas