just read thru the whole thread and i think gerbick pretty much summed it up in his previous two posts;
what i would like to add, which strikes me as important, is the fact that MeeGo or Maemo for that matter can't be compared with a traditional Linux / GNU distro because it / they are / were driven by a hardware vendor.

this will never work
period.
Intel may be a better option in that they don't manufacture devices themselves but only components.
it comes closer to the Android situation where Google doesn't care about royalties but sells Adword clicks.

i wonder in how far NOKIA will in fact stop founding maemo.org after 2012.
did they ever provide founds for more then a year at a time?

another MeeGo device ?

true, right now NOKIA sounds all wp and that's what Elop has been hired for.
that doesn't mean they do not keep doing other things in parallel. standing behind formeego.com/org or continued founding for maemo.org seem to hint at a dedicated NOKIA that supports it products.

open sourcing drivers?
this isn't NOKIA's battle.
it's TI's fight, if they want to fight it and obviously, TI has chosen not to open source their code.
just like NVidia is NOT open sourcing but providing binaries for nearly any platform one can name.
even supporting old GPUs with binaries of old drivers that are kept up to date to the current kernel version.

nVidia – The new MeeGo Battle Ground

you wouldn't be able to run any (ANY) Linux / GNU distro on an Alienware if you were depending on Dell to provide drivers.

hoping for the best...
so, what about planning for the worst?
well, obviously Intel isn't keen on an open source software market.
forums are great (& cheap) to support "geeks" (or even Dad or Mom who are playing around with... Smeegol on an old lappy during the week-end.)
to compete with fruits & Co., you need something more serious. sorry

EDIT: LF? well, the open source (reverse engineered) drivers that come with the kernel are worth... well, whatever they are worth
LF doesn't provide any proprietary code in the kernel. like i said before, it is up to NVidia, AMD/ATI, Broadcom and the like to either make the source code available or provide binaries for their hw.
openSUSE or Fedora are good examples of Linux / GNU distro that work because they are backed by SW / service companies that benefit from the open community contribution (SuSE / Novell respectively RedHat) and thus provide "hosting" and infrastructure.
DebIan is the notable exception of a distro that is totally independent.
maybe an inspiration for MeeGo / Maemo future?