What I see in Jolla smartphone and Sailfish OS is a smartphone & mobile OS with some features from desktop PC with Linux, because :
1) "The Other Half" promises some hardware (not just color) personalisation for the smartphone user, with : greater battery, hardware keyboard, different camera/flash, etc;
2) real multitasking available at the GUI, with animated miniatures of the running softwares, something seen only in Maemo, MeeGo Harmattan, BlackBerry;
3) Sailfish OS is based on Mer/Nemo which is full open source and community driven, so you can really contribute to parts of Sailfish OS, the default packages, add packages to repositories, etc. Try to do that in Android, iOS, WP, BlackBerry, etc...
4) packages with dependencies, so community developers can contribute with useful softwares which can become libraries or dependencies of many other softwares, or even the default software;
5) Sailfish OS has not only Linux kernel, but almost all parts of desktop Linux, like X11, terminal, glibc, compilers & languages (gcc, Python, etc), Qt (4.8 & 5), etc.

I see Jolla smartphone & Sailfish OS as a true successor of Nokia N9 & MeeGo Harmattan, with some innovations like hardware personalisation, more swipe gestures and richer GUI, Android compatibility and being more community driven.

Anyway, I think Jolla deserves the support of the Maemo/MeeGo community, by pre-ordering the smartphone, developing softwares, promoting it in blogs, etc.