Key word there: "sometimes." Never mind imagining IF the N9 sold hundreds of millions. Why the pretending and fantasy? Now wake up and realize the humiliating, cold, damp truth of finding yourself on your own, far from support and civilization. Sometimes, there are benefits to being niche--for the vast majority of time though, niche is just code for getting dumped under a bridge in New Jersey, naked and covered in hickies after Nokia took your money and left you on your own.

The experiences have been, overall, positive elsewhere. I've already pointed them out before: Surprisingly excellent hardware and software support even from companies that I wanted to dislike (like Verizon). It's surprisingly refreshing to be able to get parts (FREE sometimes!), frequent software updates for up to nearly two years out and, most importantly, prompt replacements and someone to speak to face-to-face in a store or kiosk. In contrast. Nokia refused to even make spare STYLUSES available much less parts, to get a whole new replacement I was able to walk into a Verizon store and instantly walk back out with a new device whereas Nokia insists that we ship our product (especially terrible if you're using an N900 as your phone!!) to them whereupon it wanders the Earth (for all anyone knows) for 30 days and it MIGHT come back as the same model--it might not. That's just the personal stuff, then there's the advantage of platforms where there are more than one vendor to choose from like Android and Windows Phone, there's the various form factors to choose from (small phones, big phones, tablets, tablet-netbook, etc.) and so on. All missed opportunities that Nokia easily could have done ages ago and people on this forum had already suggested and clamored for--so it wouldn't have been a surprise if Nokia would have been at the forefront, but that never happened. The mortal sins, though, are how poorly Nokia competes: poor customer treatment and support.

You might be happy with the N900, or you might be one of those stubborn people sitting in a filthy lake insisting it's preferable just to spite the people that have left for better waters. If you're trying to claim openness as an advantage with Maemo, you might have missed reading that part of the aforementioned ranting from Qwerty where he rightfully mentioned the riddling of closed-source components and drivers. If Nokia was so interested in open-source, they would not INCREASINGLY use closed components, argued against OGG on patent grounds, writing more and more closed-source into their product and ultimately decide to go with an admittedly and truly closed-source operating system like Windows Mobile. Ultimately, though, you'll find that the still waters of Nokia aren't healthy. Nokia's waters are very, very still even if you like your device. Just saying--you might want to keep an open and pragmatic mind.