You know, maybe they just don't have the inventory. What if they completely underestimated demand for Maemo, noticed all the buzz in July and August, and are now shitting their pants.

Excess demand is not a good thing. What if Maemo outclasses S60 so badly that a significant portion of the market decides to go for the N900? Sounds good, but what if production is still ramping up? Suddenly S60 devices are rotting on the shelves, and there are no N900:s to be sold. They could still absorb the costs of excess inventory, but selling nothing they'd probably make a loss for several quarters.

Worst case scenario, the permanently unavailable N900 makes the N97 look so bad that people get a negative association with a perfectly decent platform and go for Android instead, even if they actually would have been happy with S60 had they never heard of Maemo.


Edit: refusing operator customization is obviously not related, imho. One more processor generation and your phone and the hotel's HDTV just replaced your laptop. Nokia absolutely cannot let the operators screw with what they're going to push as the next general computing platform.