I think the N800 is cool looking in a late-1960's retro-moon-shot sorta way.
Also, it's not so much that the display controller had a flaw, as much as TI's OMAP System-on-Chip couldn't handle the big beautiful screen, so Nokia had to jam in an external controller to get it to work; by putting the controller off-chip, it slowed everything down and limited the throughput.