See, I am of two minds when it comes to this. As a Maemo user, I can see that there's a much better chance that the combined forces between Maemo and Moblin will get market penetration than these two as seperate units. Development and momentum will be noticable higher after an initial setback where you have to fight over what forum software, bugboard version, moderation system, community mechanisms etc to use for half a year.

On the other hand, I am also an N900 owner. And as a N900 owner, seeing future benefits for Meego helps little. The initial setback means focus away from my interests. And it's a simple fact that Meego means more change to the core OS than what you'd otherways expect. So fewer of the fixes/improvements might be easily backported. I honestly expect that there will be a higher pecentage of "Fixed in (next version)" when the OS main course is changing, because companies don't like to prioritize to fix code that is about to be replaced anyway. And a lower chance that effort will be used to provide an official Meego version to N900 owners. I for one would easily bet you that ice cream against the chance of an official Meego version on the N900. It's not coming. Any other expectation is wishful thinking.

Of course, we have QT 4.6 applications that in the future can be used without backporting(?). But how many of the applications I use today is QT 4.6 applications? Yes, in a year I might be able to see benefits from QT developments, but that would have happened anyway. And how long till Meego and the developers are talking about QT 5, QT 6? And Nokia will have no economical interest in backporting this. And the developers have an interest in having the best setup, so they'll move on to the next generation hardware. I have little faith in community backporting. As much as I like the idea, I don't think the MER project has done me any good as an N810 owner. I don't expect it to any time soon. And I see enthusiastic MER developers changing course towards Meego already.

As you can see, I am not as enthusiastic about this as you. Yes, it's great for the future of the OS that it's merged with another powerful organization. I am glad for that. But I don't see any of these benefits actually doing anything good for current N900 owners. QT was coming anyway.