The difference though is that finally, with Maemo, Nokia doesn't have to be the one to do all the "visible" stuff--as long as they take (good) care of the invisible stuff that nobody cares about (unless it affects them, in which case it may be a huge problem) that is the core of the platform, the other stuff will eventually take care of itself through community efforts and 3rd-party apps. It has enormous potential because Nokia can just use the same resources to focus on perfecting the core platform. If they instead take the attitude that maemo.org gives them an excuse to put less resources into it, it will be a problem, but i don't know if that's the case. This is the potential strength of Maemo over every other phone OS out there, but it's still early in the process and Nokia is not doing a perfect job of taking care of the invisible stuff, nor enabling 3rd-party apps by making Ovi something anyone can be proud of.

This is apparent in my own experience: my only real complaints for the N900 are based on things that have to be handled by Nokia because they are core apps and functionality that can't be fixed or worked-around by the community: complete, functioning offline mapping software (which is annoying because the N900 advertising was exaggerated on this point, and free&open map data isn't up to the task in a lot of areas--although it seems like there might be a possibility of a community workaround using the Ovi API), flawless phone, UI, and network performance, and meticulous power-saving measures.