I think Elop did what he had to do.... we shouldn't roast him.

We should be roasting the board of executives.

If Nokia didn't strike the deal with Microsoft, I'm certain RIM would've done it shortly thereafter. Then you'd have Microsoft with a stronger patent portfolio, a communications service, a hardware vendor and a foot into the corporate world. In fact, Windows 8 would be something to look forward to.

If anything, I think it was Intel that killed Nokia.
Maemo5 was good (is good). Starting over with .rpm and Qt5 is better, yes, but NOT in the scale of time they did it.

I think the best alternative would've been if they shipped Symbian Anna/Belle with the Nokia N8 and did so at least 6 months prior. That would've been the "stop gap".

And in the meantime, buy out Palm, have extensive patent portfolio to litigate Apple (yes I actually support this), and churn out Maemo5OS-with-webOS-UX and devices that are "good enough" to compete in the market.

I think in the meantime, Nokia could've been creating a powerful successor with the latest stable Linux kernel, rpm package system and Qt5-framework. They could've bumped up the UX again and offer upgrades for "worthy" devices. Sure it would've pissed off a lot of people, but you have to think about yourself first.

While Apple was selling the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, Nokia could've been selling a tablet like the ASUS Transformer and a phone like Google Nexus Galaxy... which may have been short of "Apps" but it would be more "revolutionary" and with a bright future with Applications.

The Samsung Galaxy S i9000 was the "make it or break it" point in time for the industry.
This is where Nokia, Palm, RIM and Microsoft all went wrong.