Personally I think Maemo is far better than Meego will ever be. I do not mind Intel, but they have nothing to compete with against arm in the mobile low power consumption market.
I think Maemo has the best GUI of any Mobile operating systems, miles ahead or boring multitask but really single task systems like Android and ios. What an inflexible way to use your telephone, to focus on apps first and have these listed in a boring grid. The desktop feeling of n900 Maemo just make ios look like something out of the stone age. Too bad android copied such a lame gui idea, and that Nokia is doing the same with Meego. Using mulitple desktops is something I got used to in Linux distroes and can never move back from to single desktop systems. Additionally the way window handling(I use KDE) works in most Linux distroes just blows away all competition. Gnome 3 looks to become brilliant as well. The single biggest strenght of Maemo like Linux distroes is this way of handling the user interface and windows, its brilliant.
How can I ever move to an app centric system again when multi tasking is made so brilliant with the n900 Maemo with the desktop view, the app button and the brilliant view of open apps and the ease of switching between them. The best possible placement and continuous easy access to the system bar just makes the N900 a genious phone instead of a smart phone. To me both ios and android lacks sophistication and overview of what is going on, constantly having to dowload half good apps to handle basic functions like open app administration just makes everything frustrating.

As a Linus system user I cannot accept that a company I buy a telephone from should dictate everything from what service provider I should use to what few things I will actually be allowed to do with the product I purchased. Maemo brings 85% freedom and 95% openess far ahead of the competition. How Nokia can throw away such great work is completely absurd. I doubt Meego will be so open. I sincerely hope Nokia will create kernels and driver packages around some of their new modern power phones that will be compatible with Maemo 6 or community Maemo v6 as it has become. Creating open legacy drivers for the N900 when the time comes would be an additional step, and anything that should be called Maemo 7 should come with compatibility layers between Busybox and Gnu so that debian/other distro packages could more easily be handled. Perhaps Nokia could contribute a compact compatibility layer for between busybox LibC and GNU libc6 among other basic libraries. This would go a long way in helping the community to build a Maemo 6 or that can be ported to many Nokia phones in the future.

Personally I think the community can carry on builidng Maemo for the future, but would need hardware implementation support from Nokia in actually getting it on new power phones.

Personally I want nothing to do with Meego and certainly nothing to do with Intel based portables. But I do hope Maemo and Meego will be compatible so that work done in either can be easily utilised in the other.

Finally I just want to thank Nokia for supporting freedom and going as far as they did wih the N900, none of the coward handset producers like apple. andoid slave co would ever dear bring such great innovation and openess, honesty, freedom and power to the markets and the users. Thanks for the slide out keyboard and the stylus, these really set apart Nokia and the N900 from the amateurs touchscreen only handsets.

I think we all have N900 and like it so much for the same resons. Personally I have considered the Nokia N900 since the beginning, but I always told friends that the next phone I would buy would have a big fold out amoled screen, yet be the smallest phone on the market and have next generation Maemo. I changed my mind some months ago when I finally realised that Nokia would go for Windows and Meego instead of Maemo. It struck me that I have to get the N900 fast, before it is taken off the market. This because the N900 looked to become a once in a lifestyle quality phone, and it is. I think we all are not incorrect in worrying that such a great hardware style and high quality OS will be lost in the future.