fremantle is currently being actively ported by folks in this community, with one of the primary goals being to able to be run it on the neo900. this is non-trivial, but recent successes in reverse engineering make it seem like it will eventually happen.

so, in short, you will be very likely be able to install maemo on the neo900, and you wont need to jump through hoops to do it. {though you should note that the porting is a community effort, quite separate from the neo900 hardware project}