Is there a way to make my HTC-Incredible phone use the optical joystick button to wake up? I'm still adjusting from going from my iPod to an HTC Incredible phone. 

One thing that is very non-intuitive for me is to press the power button when I want to "wake up the phone" after it has dimmed out. I'm just so used to using the big button on the bottom of my iPhone for this that I instinctively hit the "optical joystick" button all the time by accident.

Is there any way to configure the button so the optical joystick button can pull the phone out of sleep mode?
This should actually be pretty easy and does not require rooting or custom ROMs, but you'll need a 'lockscreen replacement' app to do it.

The app 'WidgetLocker Lockscreen' allows 'Easy Wake' that allows you to customize which button (Home, menu, trackball, volume, etc) wakes the phone. Check it out on the market, it's $1.99.

There may also be other lockscreen replacement apps out there, but that is exactly what you need: a customizable lockscreen replacement app that supports the feature you requested. WidgetLocker is an example of this.