I recently made some similar decisions. And after a brief dable with C++ and I chose Python. although I've written just for the n810 at the moment. as far as I can tell the only things that make it maemo are two calls to hildon program and hildon window. I could easily switch that and have everything work anywhere else.
I just put up a post on my blog about my first attempt to write a basic app (in this case a twitter client) using python