You are sadly mistaken if you think the general public want's to "work with the developers to get the features". I am in the process of working with developers to implement a core financial system linked with other enterprise systems and databases via EAI and ETL tools. I'm paid to do that. When I buy a phone, I either want it to work out of the box or I want to download a finished app to add the feature I want.

I don't care if apps are free, the phone and service plan will add up to $1,000+ over the course of a year so I'm perfectly willing to pay for decent apps. I am far more interested in a polished app that runs well than I am in a free app that needs work. But most of all I want it conveniently available. That is why Apple's app store has become so popular - it's easy.

Nokia - not Maemo.org - needs to populate a Nokia app store for the N900 if it is to be successful beyond the Linux programmer community. Emulating Palm's $1,000,000 to developers would be a start. Writing more apps themselves a la Google would also be good. They can't go on forever just selling potential.