I went to the New York meetup last night. I would say that it was worth my time. Here are a few random observations:

1. I didn't really see too many old-guard tablet enthusiasts there, the audience seemed to be a mix of general tech and cell-phone fans, people who looked like they might be developer types, and a few bloggers and journalists sprinkled in. It did seem like a good percentage of the audience never used the older tablets.

2. There were a couple of brief presentations. A representative from the Maemo OS development team (my memory is now hazy on his position, but someone else who was there could fill the group in) presented on the OS. Except for a brief spiel about Maemo 6, nothing was presented that the TMO group doesn't already know about, and the presentation itself was aimed at people who didn't have any experience at all with Maemo (i.e., "it's a computer with a phone tacked on", etc).

The second presentation was delivered by a representative from Qik. It was interesting on how it underscored how willing Nokia was to work with/bend over backwards to accomodate the needs of commercial developers--the Qik application for the n900 will apparently be native, and the presenter noted that Nokia allowed Qik to override some Nokia UI elements when the Qik app was running (e.g., if the camera shutter is opened when Qik is running, it won't go to the Nokia camera app as it normally would, and stuff like that).

3. As far as questions asked, there was nothing asked that anybody here doesn't already know the answer/official answer to. The Nokia representatives were intentionally vague about the release date, pretty much sticking to "some time before the end of the year". I asked a question about where they stood on whether screen protection was a necessity. The person I asked said that Nokias are tough devices, but if he had to spend that much money on a device, he would certainly consider protection of some sort.

4. Apparently, maemo is pronounced "mai-moe", rather than "may-moe" or "mee-moe". I think I will still continue to pronounce it "may-moe" out of habit. It is a made-up name, referring to an open-source OS that is supposed to be what we make it to be, after all.

5. I spent a couple of minutes playing with the device. It definitely felt solid in my hand, but still looked and felt compact. I brought my n800 with me and compared sizes: while the n900 seemed a tad bit thicker than the n800 at it's thickest point, overall the n800 truly looks huge by comparison.

As others have noted, even if you have experience with the earlier tablets, you do not notice the decreased screen size at all.

Coming from the experience of the n800, it might be a bit of a transition for me to go to the new UI. I'm so used to using a stylus and hardware buttons on a single screen, that it was a little disconcerting to be using my fingers to slide from pane to pane and manipulate the screen. I'm sure I'll get used to it though.

6. Finally, I didn't win the n900. But, it didn't turn out to be that disappointing since the winner didn't get to receive the goods that night.