I will look into it, but I don't have a suitable system available.
For the image creation, see
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...2&postcount=14
and
https://wiki.debian.org/n900-wheezy-armhf

Regarding the lack of configuration, that was intentional, so as to make clear that this is not a end-user image. Nonetheless:
* to add a user account user, adduser <username> and add the user to goups audio, video, netdev and plugdev
* to have X autostart, apt-get install a display manager such as slim
* the keymap is configured, but a loadkeys is required to load the arch-thread version of the keymap, which I like a lot but is non-standard. This can easily be automated by placing the command in /etc/rc.local.

I believe this has potential as well, but the lack of touch-enabled apps impair casual use, as opposed to dedicated use (where you can really use the stylus to pick a desktop app menu item).

Maybe a thumb-patched nemo kernel would even be used to run hildon in a chroot.

Yes, sure. My n900 has this installation on a 11Gb partition in the eMMC. The only required modification is to change /etc/fstab to use UUIDs and change the u-boot item file to point to the correct root device.