Hi Til,
Yes I believe its possible to just diplay the "B" and "I" buttons. Its similar to the Outlook or Word control. You can look at hotmail when you are using IE.
Although I don't know if its possible to restrict say: You know the shortcut keys on stuff. Maybe even tab makes a blockquote. Of course enter will insert "p"s. And pasting from another MS HTML control such as Word will carry over layout from Word, including the fonts.