When do hash indexes become reasonable?
I'm not sure what are your reasons for wanting a hash index. 

But if you are looking for indexing text/varchar columns then you can go with MyISAM/full-text or you can use something external like Sphinx or Lucene.

You can alternatively, create an additional column with a hashed version of another and as long as its 1000 bytes or less, then it can be indexed by MySQL.

I hope I have answered your question.