Of course it's nice to have a shell, to have ssh, VNC and other more sophisticated things.

But they are not necessary to operate the N800. Even if I know Linux/Unix better than English, I'm not too keen to have a shell on my N800. And most people perfectly live without it too.

The iPhone is certainly a nice device. Less heavy compared to a N800+simple mobile phone. And just one charger. But what you can basically do with an iPhone is much less than what you can do with an N800. You are much more limited regarding applications, its smallish screen which is good for WAP, but not WWW.

Does the iPhone have a pdf-viewer? I believe not. Big drawback, how do you read your ebooks then? But even if it had one, the small screen resolution would again be the obstacle.