Agree with what's being said here: Nokia need to up their game. IMHO, success of the platform (Maemo) can only stem from useability, defined as a combination of wealth of features and stability.

As we all know, the Maemo 5/N900 combination doesn't score super high on that metric compared to major competitors such as the iPhone/Android or even Symbian - love it or loath it.

Here's a real life example: with the latest f/w, it still takes about 3-5 times longer to retrieve my emails over IMAP on the N900 compared to my 2.5 years old 1st gen iPod touch (using the same wifi connection). The story is pretty much the same whether you consider music playing, maps, calendar etc etc.

The one thing I am really concerned about (as some have stated here) is the barrier to entry for 3rd party developers. Apps is one way a platform becomes more useful; I still have no replacement for Stanza, eWallet and the Oxford Dictionaries, 3 indispensable apps I used on my iTouch - which is why I still need to keep it around - sigh. Nokia need to spend a lot of effort to make it easy to develop for Maemo!

To illustrate this: I am a professional developer but I've just spent half of my Sunday afternoon installing Ubuntu and now I can't download the Maemo SDK because a number of maemo.org servers are down... in terms of frustration, this is pretty much up there!

The choice of platform/programming language also matter - they need to be easy: as others have stated, CS graduates learn Java these days, not C...

And to those who say "I don't care, all I want is a platform to hack/play games/whatever", you'll soon see how quickly Nokia will pull the plug if they can't make a viable business out of Maemo (or else the plug will end up being pulled on Nokia itself). So a certain level of main-streamness does matter!