MeeGo Harmattan was developed internally at Nokia (based on Debian). The MeeGo development on the MeeGo website really is a different beast. There is overlap in components used, but the reality is that you can't say anything about how MeeGo Harmattan development was progressing based on the information on the MeeGo site. I suspect that most of the development time (and problems) of MeeGo Harmattan were because of the totally new user interface and application set, not because of the core operation system. The MeeGo Nokia/intel collaboration was intended to be a future update of the core operation system, providing Nokia the ability to use its modern (proprietary) harmattan UX, and a modern Core OS, without the need to develop everything internally. But as it turns out building your own linux distribution from scratch isn't a very easy task, as was the development of SDK, UX and application set. Maybe a bit of an exaggeration, but Nokia effectively tried to build a house by building all parts and everything needed to make those parts at the same time. Delays and problems were bound to happen.