What would it take to port a distro to these sbc's

Welcome!

I haven’t done myself, but I might be able to point you in the right direction.

First, you need an arm64 image. What is involved in creating that, I do not know, but I’m sure Google does.

Once you have the arm image you’d use this tool to flash the appropriate bootloader:

I haven’t tried it myself, as the Libre Ubuntu image (and Batocera) cover my needs (and wants). There are some Libre-specific tools you might be missing out on for dealing with GPIO and Device Tree Overlays. They’re available on github, but I’m not sure if you can build them on all 3rd party images.

Hope that helps!