Hi,
I am the project lead for the Eclipse eRCP project that was mentioned earlier in this thread. Also I work for Nokia as part of the team that develops the Java Runtime for the Nokia Symbian devices.

I usually do not like to respond to these because they tend to get nowhere and become more about personal choices. However I think I have not engaged to maemo community before and I think some of the information I can provide may help.

First about eRCP, eRCP is an OSGi based environment that aims to carry some of the desktop Eclipse RCP pieces to mobile. The crown jewel of these pieces is eSWT UI toolkit. Nokia's S60 based phones ship eSWT (not the full eRCP stack) as part of the device and eSWT can be used from MIDP runtime. eSWT fits rather nicely to our purposes because it is basically a thin wrapper of the platform's UI toolkit. It does not impose its own look and feel like the Java's own Swing. Recently, Nokia contributed an eSWT port on Qt to eRCP project the first early access packages of eRCP including the contributed eSWT is available. Although we do not provide a package at this time, this port is known to work for maemo and it is possible to provide a package for maemo as well. eSWT's Qt port may be significant for maemo Java because it provides a future proof solution for Java UIs.

Since porting the S60 Java to maemo was listed earlier as an option some information on that. Actually when we started the work on Java Runtime 2.0, we have considered that maemo would be another target and decided to implement it cross-platform. Later when maemo showed no interest, some of the cross-platform requirements were dropped. However a significant part of the runtime can work on maemo. at least the Java UIs(eSWT and MIDP UI), installer, application launchers etc. are cross-platform. As for APIs like bluetooth, location, wireless messaging, mutimedia etc. A few of those already have their maemo implementation ready. So porting this S60 Java is a closer goal than most think.

Also Java SE is also mentioned as an option here. I believe full Java SE is too bloated for mobile(includes corba, jdbc etc). Also Android does not ship full Java SE libraries but rather a subset. I also do not think MIDP is good enough for a powerful platform as maemo(or any smartphone). Ideally Java platform should support MIDP but should provide a subset of JavaSE APIs and latest language features to be competitive against Android.

I still have more to say but this is rather long post already. I hope this is somewhat helpful information.