In my opinion it's unfair to blame MeeGo or Intel.

Maemo 5 was GTK based. Nokia has already announced before the N900 release that Maemo 6 is Qt based. So they had already begun to rebuild the UI. They would have done this even without MeeGo. They have not made that much MeeGo related changes at their Harmattan device. See the *.deb against *.rpm based discussions.

In my opinion we could say thank you to Intel because we have now a second big contributor, with a major interest to make MeeGo successful. Without MeeGo our maemo would still stuck somewhere inside Nokia. They would perhaps still release the Harmattan device without the MeeGo decision. Who knows?

But what after that?
WP7 would be the big successor inside Nokia and maemo needs a lot of manpower in the development departments. I would be so easy to stop all maemo releated work inside Nokia.

Now with MeeGo its not solely in the hand of Mr. Elop. We got chances to get maemo 5 like devices (MeeGo based) from other vendors in the future. Even without Nokia.

Currently only Tablets and Netbooks, the IVI part is growing and we could see MeeGo in Airplanes to entertain the passengers. Yes, we still miss a handset. But Intel is still very interested because Android doesn't need Intel. And even Microsoft seems to be more interested in ARM.
Perhaps we won't get a MeeGo ARM device pushed by Intel. But if Intel got their Power Management fixed I would be fine with a 386 based Handset. Why not? Android is a nice toy. But I would be able to run Wine on my MeeGo Handset without recompiling anyting. Just in case.

For my this sounds like a savor successor for my beloved N900.