Yes, I've seen the slightly less suggestive Red Pine lap steel build,

Bright, clean-sounding single-coil pickups (like the Tele bridge one), normally use 250k pots, and darker sounding humbuckers normally use 500k pots. In combination with the inductance, resistance and capacitance of the pickup itself, the pots form a low-pass filter network, which both rolls-off the treble frequencies above a certain point and also creates a 'resonant peak' at that cut-off frequency and so emphasises the frequencies around the cut-off point. The higher the pot resistance, the higher that cut-off frequency is and the brighter the pickups sound, the lower the value, the more the highs are attenuated.

So unless you want a really bright sound, you'd be best sticking with 250k pots. Audio taper for the volume (these will normally say A250k on the pot), and audio or linear taper for the tone - linear pot would read B250k. I quite like audio taper for the tone as it's easier to just knock a little treble off, whilst linear can get quite dull quite quickly. It's more a matter of personal choice, whereas for the volume pot section an audio taper will give an even-sounding volume reduction, whilst linear will get quiet very quickly and make it very difficult to reduce the volume by a small amount.

It's also normal for the volume and tone pots to have the same resistance values, though you could try a 500k tone pot for a slightly brighter edge to the overall sound, which can work well on Strat pickups for example. The Fender TBX tone circuit is a dual gang pot with different pot resistance values. Below 5.5 on the dial, it works like a normal 250k tone pot, but above 5.5, it winds in a higher resistance from the second pot, which adds a bit more zing to the sound and can make a Strat sound even more "Stratty" (I've only tried Strats with this fitted, so can't comment on what it does on a Tele).

And there's nothing to stop you from putting in a 500k tone pot and having it turned down a bit normally (as it can easily give you just a 250k value) if you ever feel like you want a bit more edge to the sound (...this one goes up to 11).