I fear that according to Nokia's own choices in regards to system requirements, the N900 is a dead end and isn't terribly all that "modern". No multiple touch support, you tend to find resistive screens in ultra-cheap Android tablets from no-name manufacturers in China.

There is no Flash 10.x support, now being blamed to hardware (Adobe shares the blame here), the N900 lacks RAM to run MeeGo 1.3 (Nokia chose the hardware) - the N900 MeeGo 1.2 CE runs a little... well, unoptimized.

Yes. It has the ability to run full-blown Debian. I can run Ubuntu on my Xoom - full-blown Ubuntu. I have Flash 10.3 on my Xoom, Atrix. I have full (or close enough) HTML5 support where sites that use heavy AJAX don't choke my phone (Atrix and Dell Venue Pro w/ Mango) upon trying to view those sites.

The N900 is an awesome piece of kit. But it is showing its age. Small-ish screen, horrific battery life, non-gorilla glass screen, 600mhz (out of the box) processor, lacking RAM, dwindling support, dying community, limited 3G spectrum in my market (N9's Penta-band solves my problem), lack of apps despite being the "most open" - thank Mece for Tweed Suit, before it, Twitter was basically forgotten, Mauku was "closed source" and never released to the community.

So yeah. I agree... the N900 is/was pretty nice. But time has passed it by in price, expectation and development. And it has been undercut in price by other feature phones, some smart phones. And the Grid 4 actually is cheaper than it on release... patience will probably mean it'll be even cheaper later down the road.