Can't figure out why it's so hard to believe for some that Nokia may be releasing 2 x devices.

they produce a device (with hwkb) that, at the time of development has some pretty good specs (as long as you're not one of those sucked into the whole CPU speed/bulk ram joke)

for whatever reason, be it kb issues (as originally stated) or UI, there's little interest from carriers and as a result, Nokia has an initial run of production units that it doesn;t know what to do with.

Several months later, EFLOP has taken over and is pushing MS as the OS of choice for high end devices.
He wants to kill of Meego development but certain influential members of the board/exec committee prefer to hedge their bets in case the MS decision fails.

Grab a revised handset UX image from the harmattan team, blow a copy of it onto the rejected devices and you have a "developer device". they get to offload the devices to a community of developers (who will make applications for them) and write the whole box and dice off as a valid tax claim for R&D.
In the mean time, they have fianlly got their act together sufficiently to produce a fully functional OS to go on one (of many) of their prototype candybar devices. (hints of the harmattan/Meego candy bar are strikingly similar to the WP7 branded nokia images doing the rounds)
Everyone here is assuming that ALL of Nokia is dancing to EFLOP's tune. you can guarantee that there are people in high places that are working hard to keep Harmattan/Meego alive and this is the sort of exercise that could be sold to the board as a means of keeping the dev community on Nokia's side despite the move to MS.

Despite many predicitons, the N8 and E7 are doing very well in a number of markets and if the "consumer" harmattan device is a raging success (candybar or not), it's going to provide a tremendous amount of leverage internally, for those who are still trying to keep the move to Meego alive.

Money talks and Bullsh*t walks.
Good returns on a commercial harmattan device will make it hard for EFLOP to justify sticking exclusively with WP7 (or 8) when there's a viable in-house product already making sales.