Note: For anyone reading this and who has a similar problem, the answer is in response #8.
Did you request a specific screen orientation? 'Cause the way you're doing it, you're only going to get the screen orientation your activity requested, not the current orientation (at least that's what I'm assuming, based on the docs). If not, and you just want the orientation the screen is currently using, the way you should be getting the screen orientation is through the Display class's getRotation or getOrientation methods.
Bear in mind, the latter is deprecated in 2.2, and it's recommended you use getRotation. However, getRotation is only available in 2.2, so it depends on which API version you're targeting - you could also check, using reflection, to see if getRotation is implemented and use that when it is.
That said, I don't know if you can get the orientation in onCreate. I assume you can, but I haven't tried this myself (since I haven't needed to know the orientation at that point).