Nokia's key issue was it could no longer effectively develop software in-house, be it Symbian or maemo/meego. the lead times were becoming far too long and the end product was not polished enough.

what Elop has done is to out-source the software development for future (smart)phones to Microsoft. Whether that was the correct outfit and platform to trust will be made clear in time.

It could be argued that this process started before Elop when Nokia canned maemo and got into bed with Intel and the linux foundation to move forward with meego. although nokia was contributing still, the strategic direction etc was no longer nokias key concern, and they could get on with building phones. Maemo was probably 80% complete of a modern smartphone OS, but at a board level Nokia probably realised that they could never complete that last 20%, and so pushed most development and governance to someone else.

Nokia's decision to pull back from the meego frontline could be therefore good for meego development as it will not have to the nokia corporate anchor holding it back, so development should hopefully speed up.

For nokia, putting meego on a phone should be no more of an issue or risk than chucking WP* on it. Both OSes are bought in from external sources and if meego is up to the job then great.