Well actually there is a way to do it.
PCElliott went the right way. Convert it to a cube and make it a multiresolution panorama. Then just limit the viewing area.
Yes you get a lot of tiles and most of them are black as you just cover a small part of the panorama.
In
PCElliotts case it were 19.000 tiles. In my case it were ~80.000.
So I used a little script to check the colors of all tiles and delete each black tile as well as all the directories where they where in.
In my example it was a 360 degree cylinder but it also works with partial images of course.
Here is my example:
http://llj.li/p/6fm2v
(the small strip is still 1.8 gigapixels so you can imagen how huuuuggeeeeee the whole cube was!