I think we both agree that the safe thing to do is wait until the phone comes out and there's more information available (although that said, I think Amazon has a pretty lenient 30 day return policy, which would allow for one to do the best thing and try it out for oneself).

But the original poster's question was, in part, to express worry about the phone function, base on a bad experience with the iPhone and ask if he should wait.

So the question becomes, if you're going to take a chance and not wait and just leap in, is the phone function an area you should be particularly worried about? The best you can do, if you want to be an early/immediate adopter, is try to come to a conclusion based on the best information currently available. I attempted to provide some information by linking to several reviews that discuss the phone functionality.

So no one is suggesting that anyone blindly follow anyone's advice. That's just a caricature of the argument that you keep asserting. Although I will say that your original off the cuff remark about what the "majority" of people are saying and you're reference to Texrat's one sentence remark, comes a lot closer to asking someone to just take your word for it (i.e. blindly follow your advice), than my providing several long reviews of the phone by people who have actually used it, so that the original poster and others can read some people's first hand experience with the N900 and come to their own conclusions.

Basically, you've decided to put faith in a couple people, try to indirectly suggest others should do the same, and as far as I can tell not read the reviews I provided, but nonetheless keep trying to discredit them with your highly general impressions of Maemo, your "suspcions," your use of belittling language like "lockstep," and just what amounts to a lot of conjecture on your part. All of which, again, to me seems a lot more like asking others to blindly follow your advice, than to give them meaningful information, with which they can come to their own conclusions. I trust that others are intelligent enough to know what to do with substantive information, once it's available to them.