After all think about why you do like maemo. Not because of what it is, because it frankly is a mess of a dependency spaghetti with parts of etch and sarge, closed binary blobs from nokia and GUI apps so tangled that Nokia didn't even bother to sort it out, and built a giant metapackage with everything as a dependency. We all like it because it is so close to what we want. It is so close to a full computer in the pocket, it has a proper package manager, a proper display server, support for GTK and Qt so that most of the desktop apps can be compiled, fully functional terminal and so on.

Mer ticks more boxes than maemo in this regard. It is a proper distribution with less castrated/patched tools and free from binary blobs. Apps might be closed source but that was always the case with maemo with the added "benefit" that removing the apps destroyed the system.

That is why I see that the obvious future of the mobile linux world is there.

And you can run hildon-desktop on mer if you so desire