Hi all.
Good topic and one that has been discussed inside Nokia a lot as well. Nice to see a Brainstorm on it.

Yes we acknowledge that the current SDK is not the best choice for people who are not familiar with the platform and would just like to do an application to try out the platform.

Yes we are working on it. Developers who aren't familiar with Maemo should have an easier time getting on board, no question about that.

As a quick help there are the VMWare and Nathans VPC (respectable hobby project!) images available.

Also using Qt really eases the learning curve a lot in the beginning. Qt Creator can be used as an IDE even though the compilation still needs to happen under the SDK.