Glen,

Based on your use-case I have developed a custom workflow activity to expose the values of a List Field as tokens.  Once installed the custom activity will allow you to select metadata List Fields and it will then expose each value in the list as a token that is available for use in the workflow.  As you mention, a good example is a using the exposed tokens in a Conditional Decision activity.  Here is a screen snip of the activity;

In this example I am retrieving the values in the 'Certification Document Type' List Field and exposing each of the values as tokens.

Finally, here is what it looks like in the branching logic;

In this case the List Field value token evaluates to the text 'Background Check'.

Some advantages to this approach are that you don't have to remember what the list contents are as you can select them from the list.  Also, if the List Field values are modified later and you republish the workflow it will throw an error because the token will no longer exist. 

The List Field Tokenizer custom workflow activity is available as a free download from the Qfiche website at http://qfiche.com/products