Generally speaking I think I remember an article about Apple's appstore stating that Apple has approx. 20 (?) full-time employees just testing 3rd party apps before making them available to end users (Darn, did not bookmark it).
I don't think that letting a company decide is the best solution if you have a community around like we have in maemo.org.
I hope that the number of Maemo "fans" will increase with the launch of the N900 and that some of them will join testing -devel and -testing apps and promoting (as much as I hope that more people will join the Bugsquad and that we won't lose them directly again as they become developers, like it happens so often in KDE and GNOME Bugsquad, but that's totally different debate). ;-)