I couldn't agree more. It's the most natural thing in the desktop word: The same operating system and the same applications I use on my quadcore desktop run nicely on my 500Mhz Celeron Laptop. They are slower, yes, but they start fine and are usable.

None of these applications needs a quadcore processor. They take advantage of it if its there and they run faster, but else it's just a "very fast computer" vs. a "somewhat slow computer".

What doesn't really run on the laptop is the eye candy from compiz fusion. That's an extra layer that can be added or removed without applications even being aware of it.

I still wait for the day when the same thing will be true for Maemo: Let any future OS2012 etc. run on your old N800; just turn off speech recognition and holograms and fall back to 2D-menus. Which in turn means for developers: Test your applications on all hardware and consider it a bug if it doesn't run at all on slower hardware. Make it run on the N800 even if it's written with the N1200XL in mind. It will be a little slow on the old device, but the reward will be an incredibly fast application on the N1200XL.