It's been mentioned before that Maemo is a contender for a flagship smartphone platform for Nokia and I believe the tablets were a process put in place to test the viability of linux and open source. Nokia are hiring new developers as recently as this month.

The profit margins that Nokia make in a worldwide recession are I think relatively non consequential to maemo. As a result of those figures posted today Nokia stock leapt up by 7-8%, their stockholders are probably pretty happy with that.