Obviously nobody can ever be certain of anything, but I think your conclusion is based on incomplete information. You do realize that Maemo SW has been hiring like mad over the past year, right? You do also realize that they've been working very hard on the next software release (and, so far, we've had 2 pre-alpha releases to prove it) and that there's quite a lot of information about the potential hardware for the next release, right?

I mean, all the strong assurances from Nokia employees that Maemo isn't going anywhere anytime soon could just be a marketing and that little tidbit about Linux ending up on high-end Nokia phones could just be nothing, or, again, you might just not have the full picture. Companies don't generally pour money into things they're planning to kill.