I think you are right on many levels...

As for an earlier remark about Nokia saving dollars with this approach I think yes and no. Whatever money they may have saved went into developing a new device that allows FOSS in the first place... not to mention support for this community itself plus the program that provided loaner devices to individuals with forum nicknames instead of corporate partners.

Nokia has also provided this device without kowtowing to the demands of service providers which have crippled many a good device in the past in order to protect revenue streams that never fully materialized in the first place.

This open source approach also saves money in the future for Nokia and device users, IMHO. You will notice that not a lot of licenses from third parties are included with the firmware. Even my Motorola "dumb phone" pays MS a royalty on every unit sold for the use of something. (pro'ly just the ability to connect to a Windows Box in order to program and sync)
In a FOSS world Motorola could have released the phone with out this ability and relied on independent developers to provide the drivers or relied on Linux only for program and sync operations. They didn't because they did not want to limit sales in anyway... In the end the consumer pays for this type of thinking but he gets polish.

I doubt anyone would suggest that Nokia actively promoted the N900 as a replacement for any phone currently on the market including Nokia's own devices.

In the end all this crying for features that have proprietary licenses attached may result in Nokia ceding some independence with Maemo6 by reaching agreements with third parties. This may add polish but it will remove some of the advantages inherent in Maemo5 like anonymity and access to many device API's.

If they do have to get into bed with a third party my hope is that it would be Google and not MS but who knows? (Besides that is a topic for another thread.) Does anyone remember the Harmattan screen shots that were posted many months ago (May I believe) showing advertisement on the device desktop?

You can't have your cake and eat it too... But it looks like to me with Maemo5 you have all the ingredients available to make a tasty pie.

Good pies need time to bake.