This is the frustration I've been having. There's just enough that's non-standard or broken on the maemo platform that simply porting applications constantly is more difficult than it needs to be. To address your specific example, I've been trying to find some way to use the built-in camera for ages, but I'm constantly being stymied by things like:

• The tablet randomly crashes or reboots when taking full-resolution photos
• Audio and video can only be recorded together if you use the Nokia-supplied GStreamer plugins, but the A/V never stays in sync, no matter what resolution you use.
• The kernel driver for the camera throws random I/O errors, corrupting the video stream. This might be the cause for any or all of the above problems.
• The camera cannot be used as a V4L1 device, ruling out a vast majority of existing Linux software
• Audio support is also quite non-standard, especially audio input.

In my time with the tablet, I've seen this kind of problem encountered many times. The community gets all excited about a new application for the tablet, everyone starts pitching in, then a big, nasty problem comes up and interest just kind of fizzles away, because it requires a lot of work to workaround these kind of problems, and it is often just too much for the return on investment.