Yeah. Your best bet is to set up the Harmattan Platform SDK (Scratchbox) on a Debian/Ubuntu install - if you use something else, make a virtual machine. You can then put together a source package and use dpkg-buildpackage to compile it into a .deb. However, that's a lot more complicated of course - I don't think there's a good solution for making "quick and dirty" .debs.

(On the other hand, there's a lot of half-baked .debs for Maemo - it's probably a good thing if people start using the more official tools in order to make high quality .debs)