Yes, you should be excited.

We like tablets, but commercially they are an unproven, perhaps perpetually niche, market. Like it or not (and I don't, personally), the future of tablets at Nokia is tied to Maemo. By pulling together a great number of resources under the Maemo platform, that increases the chances that there will be a tablet in the future. By producing a cell phone that uses Maemo, but has broad market appeal, there will be large volumes of sales, which means revenue, which means financial stability for the Maemo platform. Read Peter's post #531. Yes, the tablet form factor may be overshadowed by Maemo and by a different device, but Nokia is not necessarily moving away from it.