I srsly doubt everyone will hate Maemo 5

Device slowdown isn't really a big issue for me as long as it's not phone-centric functionality that slows down. On my WinMo 6 phone, I can make the phone functionality stop working by starting certain software. That would be a problem. However, slowdowns because you install software on a secondary, slower partition is, well, just too obvious. When we choose to buy a phone with limited capacity, we should expect it to behave like a phone with limited capacity. It's still a killer phone, and it must be considered a fair tradeoff, excellent even, if it slows down because we installed more software than there's room for in the 256MB. The alternative would be having a phone where you could not install more software at all.

Which is kinda what I'm experiencing with my N810 right now, it refuses to update my packages cause of no room, and I haven't had the time/energy to figure out ways to move moar stuff out.

The N900 will be better out of the box, and hopefully I'll not have to limit myself quite as much as I do on the N810.

I am looking forward to getting mine. But it's not going to be perfect. I am going to be very interested to one day see what Step 5 of 5 is.