I suspect this is Nokia's way of offloading the sole responsibility for the OS, which is probably good in the long term. I am concerned about bug fixes for my n900 being kept up, and with continued compatibility with new stuff coming out.

But the N900 is not a computer that I can attach peripherals to--it is pretty static in its hardware. Unlike with a Linux distro such as Ubuntu, they don't have to keep up with the newest network interfaces and usb drives and such. But they do have to keep up with existing hardware issues like the front facing camera, and I can only hope that they will continue to do so.

But apps have always been the real weakness of this phone. Aside from Firefox, we are not seeing a maemo logo next to the iphone and windows logo on lots of mobile sites. If this new system is seen as having some sort of critical mass, it means that arm-based QT apps will be on the menu for developers. Especially if those apps can be done in a higher level language like Python that will make "porting" (by that I mean recompiling for a new processor) unneccesary. And that may include symbian phones.

In short: If Nokia pushes QT as the primary development system for MeeGo (and even if they don't) I suspect this will lead to MANY more apps available for the N900 than we currently see.

P.S. we have seen people running OSX, Windows 95, and Windows 98 on the N900. I predict that within days of the source code being posted, someone will have MeeGo ported to N900. Drivers for the cameras, accelerometer, phone, and GPS will be a question as to whether it is an experiment or an actual upgrade for the phone.