I don't have a technical argument - I completely agree that a better way to do things would be as a Qt backend and not a frontend on top of Qt. I also believe that the Maemo/Symbian people have done their best to use the Qt toolkit to create great device UIs in an acceptable timeframe, and sometimes in that process the API choices are optimized for short-term device UI work and not for portability - that's inevitable if Nokia ever wants to go to market. If I was in their place, I don't know if I could have done a better job on the same schedule and conditions without knowing what I know now, when it's already done (but maybe someone else would).