But if all you had were people who are field workers who spend little time at their desks, leaving a monitor and keyboard at their desk, with the N900 playing the role of PC works there.

But as you say, you could start with a small Atom-based PC, or you could start from the N900, and take the 8GB pen drives and push those funds into either extra internal storage, or even network storage.

EDIT: Though they'd not do this, I would make it a requirement for the entire Maemo dept within Nokia to use this setup daily. Beside getting many of the usage kinks worked out because of day to day use, it would allow for more functional applications and processes to be explored by the very group trying to kick mobile computing up a notch.