Interesting. For some reason, either due to my phone carrier or Blogger, the html markup I sent in the message came through as html entities instead, which is why it is visible in the above post. Gonna have to poke around in settings some more to see if I can change that. If nothing else I need to figure out how to do a line break.
Apparently, according to this help article, I'm pretty much screwed. My phone apparently sends the email as plain text (unsurprisingly), and will always escape the bracket characters. I'm a little unclear as to why they would choose to implement it this way in Blogger. sigh.... Off to see if I can at least figure out a way to send carriage returns then.