Everything I have read implies we will NOT get Meego, as Meego ultimately will be designed around functionality the N900 simply cannot provide (eg multi-touch).

As said above, just because Meego is currently being developed on N900 hardware does not mean that the final "usable" version will still do so. Its a convenient platform to develop on for now but once they get going I am sure they will build more suitable prototypes that support the features Meego will have that the N900 cannot support. For a start I very much expect Meego hardware to have at least 512MB for root making it immediately incompatible with the N900 without a lot of hackery. Now before you ask why the N900 couldn't do that, it simply was not available at the time. Nokia use third-party chip designs because its super expensive to design your own, and 256MB was all you could get.

What we know for sure we WILL get (or at least has been promised) is a certain amount of "Meego compatibility" on the N900. The start of this comes in PR 1.2 in the form of Qt4.6 I believe, so that people can start writing applications for the N900 that will be compatible with Meego. Very optimistic perhaps seeing as how can you write compatibility with something which is not finalised yet, what about those things you just need to use Hildon for, will some of the DBUS calls change? There are still a lot of questions I feel.

Love it or not (and I do), there are plenty of things broken in Maemo 5. It would not have been a good move for Nokia to just drop it now leaving all the missing functionality and bugs. I do not mean portrait mode or voice guidance, I'm not holding my breath on those coming, its silly things like the missing "delete from playlist" option in media player, or bluetooth and WiFi still interfering with each other, those really need to get fixed for anyone to have faith on their next device. For a start, if the first Meego device has no keyboard I won't be buying it and regardless, I have at least another 12 months before I would be thinking of replacing the N900.

As for Meego itself, we do not know exactly how different from Maemo it will be. Some of us might actually be annoyed if they pushed out Meego as "the only firmware update for the N900" and it completely changed how things worked and totally broke compatibility with existing software. People talk as if Maemo 5 is complete garbage and they want rid ASAP, that is far from true. Its more little things that need fixing and they can be fixed today, not in 6 months time. I certainly do not want to wait 6 months to get the "delete from playlist" option on my N900, I would rather have that now thanks.

Also I for one hate the idea of a pannable desktop as its quite similar to how Windows Phone 7 works and from the little playing I did in the emulator, I don't like it. Its too tempting to let things spill over onto more than one page rather than coming up with a good design to make it all fit properly. Scrolling should always be minimised wherever possible, the current desktops works quite well as I just group different activities on their own desktop, would be overly complicated if you had up and down ones too or one big desktop.