I think that Nokia is going to have loose-loose situation with this Maemo6/MeeGo stuff. But the root reason in my opinion is not that much whether the Maemo6 is available for N900 or not. That is just an implication from the more disaster decision which is that Nokia is stuck with the idea that the new software comes with a new device.

Currently hw is easier - not easy but easier - to make than sw. Therefore the delay for the device launch comes most probably from the sw, not hw. And if your hw does not have anything special then the delay may makes the device look 'old' already at the launch time. That happened with N97. So what Nokia has to do is to try to make the sw ready on time for the next device at any cost, that is put more resources for sw which eventually means less resources for the earlier device's sw - Maemo5.

This situation could have been avoided if the next maemo device 'N910' has been planned to launch with Maemo5. With that approach 'N910' could be launched on time with minimal risk from the sw point of view, the better sw would be available for N900, and eventually there would be much more time to develop Maemo6 and it could be launched with good quality as an upgrade for 'N910'.

Nokia is now trying to convince people that Maemo6 applications run very well in Maemo5 with Qt libraries. On the one hand I tend to believe that but on the other hand I'm afraid that with the current approach there will be two buggy, half-baked Maemo platforms with lot of problems. Ux is not technology, it is just, well, Ux. It took me two years to understand the difference between Gnome and Kde. I was just a happy user wondering why some applications did have so much new dependencies, but I couldn't care less because applications just worked. The same should happen with Maemo, but I think Nokia won't be able to do that.