Not sure why I am writing this, but I felt I ought to.
A couple of days ago I was using Maemo Mapper whilst leaning forwards against an open window at the hostel I'm currently in (first floor) when I dropped my 770. Two storeys. Onto solid concrete. The protective shell was on the back and the unit fell on its backside. The only damage done (except for numerous small dents in the shell and two nasty dents in the upper plastic corners) was a series of vertical black lines along the left hand side of the screen--what happened was that the whole image was moved by a few pixels to the right (sort of like a barcode, but one in which the "white" parts are continuous with each other). Furthermore, the digitiser correctly registers my taps. Otherwise, the unit is perfectly fine.
Hats off to Nokia.

Moral of the story: Nokia please bring back the hard shell in future models.