I find it soo paradoxical that Maemo community (ok, _some_ people in the community) feel so betrayed when there is some closed code somewhere. Yet In the other end we have Iphonelinux team that has reverse engineered a 100% closed system with no docs, and is already booting Linux on it.

"Bwaa, the wifi driver is closed, we can't maintain a community edition"
"Ok, heres a open wifi driver"
"*crickets*"

Would the same thing happen if charging would suddenly go OSS?

If, in fact you have something like MER or deblet already pretty much working from the already open bits, you are going to be in a much better negotiation position to discuss howto redistribute/open up the remaining legacy stuff.