The thing with an app store is that as GA said, linux users aren't the typical market for buying software as usually everything is free and open source no? Iphone, blackberry, windows mobile they are all targeted towards a huge consumer base and market with a lot of money that is willing to be spent (for example, businessmen who don't care about spending $40 for spb mobile suite to make their windows mobile phone more productive) whereas the internettablets and maemo itself is not incredibly popular (you mention iphone to a random person, they know what you're talking about, you say nokia n800 and they stare at you like you're an alien from a distant planet). Even if you had an app store hoping the monetary incentive would attract people, the incentive isn't very strong with a market far smaller than an iphone or blackberry. Developers would be far more inclined to spend their time developing an app for the iphone/wm/blackberry/symbian because they would make more money. I think in the case for maemo, it would be better to stick with people in the community developing for incentives other than monetary. GA's idea of improving app manager i think is a great solution, but looks tedious. it might be easier to just start over with all the repositories. right now if i click "view applications availble to download" i get a huge list and i dont' know what each node means

edit: oh and i forgot to mention android. although opensource, it's marketing (through google and tmobile) is vastly superior to that of nokia's for the internettablet (as it's thunder was stolen by the itouch :P ) and the fact that many phones in the future are probably going to have android as the os, there would be of course a higher financial gain for them as it's users are just normal cellphone consumers as opposed to maemo with only the internettablets using the os, (and even then people always porting other OSes like android and garnet VM :P) maemo appstore imho financial motivation would not be a great incentive.