What you're not considering is that the iPhone and Maemo are at two different stages. The iPhone is at a mature state (for the most part), but it took time to get it there.

Maemo is still in a young, immature state... and that's something that's been known since the beginning. The difference here is that Apple did all their development internally and behind closed doors, whereas Nokia decided to try and experiment with Maemo and make it open WAY earlier, putting out hardware earlier.

Yes, there's a different market for the two right now. Maemo isn't meant for the consumer yet. Fremantle is basically the first attempt to making this platform more mainstream, along the same lines of the first release of the iPhone. Remember, the iPhone didn't have stuff like Unity (which I also use at work) until later on in its life. If the Fremantle device ends up being a much more mainstream piece of hardware (more mainstream than the tablets anyway), we're going to get a lot more interest from developers... we're going to get people thinking about putting out middleware like Unity for the platform (which is much easier now considering the Fremantle device and the iPhone 3GS run on the same CPU).

Essentially speaking, the 770, N800 and N810 are prototype devices getting us to version 1.0, the Fremantle device, if you want to compare them to Apple's releases.

You can't just snap your fingers and boom, you've got a mature device. So yes, people are trying to solidify the basics (bash, etc...) so that we can have a chance to build something better on top of it. You're right, we're not going to attract iPhone devs right now because it just doesn't make much sense to try to do so.

That's just my interpretation though. We'll see what happens when Fremantle is released.