Pretty much all you said has been said before. It is the frustrating part of the N800 tablets. We love the hardware, we aren't interested in the "other" devices out there because they don't measure up on some level, BUT

But the software side of the N800 is still SO WEAK. I'm guessing a lot of the development efforts end up going into the subsystem (hildon-gtk, microb, etc.) rather than in the polish and usability.

It is not hard to come up with simple and obvious UI fixes for almost everything on the tablets. Hopefully there is time for Nokia to get these things done before something else comes along that can draw us away.