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.