As far as what's in the N900 and what isn't -- as opposed to whether a smaller package could have been engineered to contain the same features at equal quality -- this is really the same discussion as the many we had pre-announcement of the N900. Some people want to do away with the stylus, some want more battery capacity, I would gladly dump the camera and speakers to make a smaller and lighter package, many of us wish Nokia had used a 4.1"+ screen, etc.

Hopefully, in the future, there will be more concurrent Maemo devices and we'll each get variations closer to what we want.