And what is wrong with that? One organization puts in place a platform and the minimum set of features to make it useful to end users. Third parties develop additional applications for it with different levels of quality and success.

This isn't a special platform development story, isn't it. However, it starts becoming kinda special when these third parties collaborate in an open community. And this is the role plaid by the maemo.org name.

Btw, an interesting exercise would be to make that list with all the best apps and see what is the role of Nokia as a community player, in terms of people working at/for Nokia developing on Maemo for fun, projects supported directly or indirectly with Nokia funds... You make a bright separation between Nokia and the community, but the facts probably tell otherwise.