Jeff-
Short answer- Yes, you need to write a script to do this in ArcPad. You may want to create the unique ID by calling your autoincrement script from the 'On FeatureAdded' event for the layer, and then pass that value to an initialization script the form'OnLoad' event to initialize the form control as it is loading. That said, we had so much trouble getting an autoincrement script to work in ArcPad (no programmers here) that we decided to use a Julian Date (yymmdd + 24:00 hour time) as our unique ID field, which is easily done by accessing the date/time object.