Just a guess, but Apple seem to be very good at the UI, this is really the only reason why the iPhone sells, it's all part of their marketing campaign, so, although the iPhone uses safari, I reckon that they have customised it for their device to make it work in the best way possilbe.

.....and remember, the iPhone is not open source, so will only work on iPhones, whereas Maemo is, and could work on any device with the correct hardware specs, irrelevant of the physical screen size of the device.

With that in mind, the browser works exactly the same as any other main stream browser, ie, firefox, chrome......and probably safari if its on a device other than the iphone/ipods etc.