My personal belief is that the situation is even BETTER than how stskeeps has itemised.

Not only should you not worry, but be prepared for a new age of choice, increased innovation, standardization, and use-ability.

Choice

This is very difficult for people that don't run a Linux desktop to understand, so perhaps a little explanations is in order.

1. I have a PC. I don't rely on Microsoft or Apple to give me operating system updates.
2. I can run a range of Linux variants on my PC. There are 100s of variants, but lets take the two that are most similar in approach to MeeGo as examples, Namely Redhat Linux and Novell SuSE.

3. I use these as examples not because they happen to use RPMs for software distribution containers, but because they are SOLD and supported by professional companies that need to make money to stay alive. You could lump Ubuntu here , but I digress.

4.Both Red Hat and Novell have community driven versions of their flagship operating systems, called Fedora, and Open SuSE respectively.

5.I can choose to use the professional versions from both Redhat and Novell, which have greater stability, and typically are paid for box sets with annual support charges (thats how they make their money) but as a user I know when I place a support call to them they will look into it and provide patches and help trouble shoot problems. Downside though is these version typically get less advanced features, less updates.

Or I can choose to use Fedora or Open SuSE. They have latest features, bleeding edge functions and get very frequent updates at no cost to me and are free to download. They have thriving communities, lots of informal help, and shed loads of applications.

no doubt many variants of MeeGo will materialze as we have already seen in Moblin. And it will put more pressure on the ARM vendors to release drivers for MeeGo.


Increased innovation

Meego now has the resources to become mainstream and upstream distribution. It already has downstream variants with major support from all three of the major Linux vendors.

-Novell SuSE Moblin will become MeeGo
-Fedora Mini a Moblin based distro will become MeeGo
-Ubuntu Remix will become MeeGo

and now Maemo will become MeeGo, and I assume Mer will become “Open MeeGo”.

With so much “wood behind the same arrow” innovation will accelerate

Standardization

The biggest complaints from old Tablet owners is Nokia's constant change of the base OS. But today we find that MeeGo is now owned by the Linux Foundation, Keepers of the unification effort of Linux called the Linux Standards Base LSB. Many of the Linux wars like Gnome vs KDE, composite managers, Sound API's, Media containers etc etc have all pretty much settled down. Nokia has been brought into the Mainstream, and is now part of Mainstream that it will be less able to make “dumb decisions” on its own. There will be more eyeballs and more interested parties in making sure that the platform is a success for its Developers and users.

Useability

Imagine Qt is the standard development tookit for MeeGo. Imagine the productivity gains across MeeGo,Symbian,Linux etc. More cosistant UI's across not just he OS but the applications as well.

I believe that our N900's will have a longer and more exciting life with Meego than without.

Bring on the MeeGo Nokia Booklet.