This is how the market leads us to shiny toys with no useful functionality. If there's little evidence of a market for such devices, then nobody is going to finance creating them. Creating custom hardware for a low volume market is an expensive business, software for the same probably even more so.

Based on what I see up to now, I would/will roll the dice and buy at the outset because decent initial sales improves the odds that :-

(a) Enough effort is put in from both sides to get a desirable OS up to a decent standard, and

(b) When the alternative OS reaches that point, it'll still be possible to buy a new device to put it on.

(c) Chen will be encouraged enough to carry on and create an even better device next time round!

I'm sure everyone has things they don't like about SFOS and Jolla, but I'm pretty certain there wouldn't be SFOS on the X if no-one had bought the unknown quantity of the Jolla 1. Yes there's gripes and missed promises, but I'd still rather SFOS 3 than any of the current alternatives I've seen.