Hey qgil, my man...

I figured I'd do a little less arguing and pitch an idea instead.

How about this:

Since the app can 'choose' weather it wants to support portrait, there is little worry here as the community will drum something apps up based upon demand.

For the desktop...

If widgets are limited to fitting into 2 adjacent 400px x 400px boxes (roughly half the usable area of the desktop), then rotation and re-alignment should be a simple matter: rotate the two boxes and stack one on top of the other (perhaps scale a touch -- thank jeebus for clutter). The flick gesture could remain be up/down (== side to side in landscape).

For the selection menus...

This can be applied to buttons/text/onscreen elements as well, but it implies that all items fit comfortably within two 400x400 boxes in landscape, which can more or less be automatically rotated and stacked in portrait.

I believe the N97 does something similar with it's home screen, though there's no reason why the widgets/buttons/textboxes on the N900 would have to be a uniform size.

Whaddaya think?


YARR!
}:^)~