Okay Qim, here's a few more for the road :-)
I understand that the notion of "winning argument " is heavily dependent on corporate culture, but the strategy of the ostrich can be a dangerous one. If the number of "User X" is significant compared to the sales target, and "feature YYY" follows a very clustered distribution around two or three recurring topics, then it certainly could pay to pay attention.
Though ITT is certainly *the* focal point for this community, I closely follow four more sites (another in English and three in French) where the tablets are either a central topic or one frequently discussed. My feedback in this thread about PIM issues is not based on personal pet peeves, but on statistical-if-unscientific observations there. For instance, I myself could care less about opening Word/Excel files on my own tablet (I would gladly trade that for a sync'ed calendar :-), but the topic is clearly a recurring one, and one that hurts sales. Benny1967 here bought the tablet despite *perceived* limitations, and later was glad he did. But so many more didn't even give it a chance.
Okay, I misread that one, sorry. Hope there'll be good news after the holidays :-)
"cheap" is of course relative. There is of course an added cost in helping an OSS project achieve the level of functionality, integration and user-readiness required here. These costs are real, but probably marginal compared to doing those same projects from scratch, in-house, like Psion did. I suppose the Opera licenses for the 770 and N800 have cost real money. I suppose the development of the much-maligned osso-email-client, the sometimes-finicky RSS reader, the not-very-useful Notes app, and the format-sensitive media-player all incurred the sort of costs you speak of, too.
When I see what single developers, working on-and-off to tie in existing OSS projects with Maemo/Hildon, were able to do with Minimo, Claws, Pan, MPlayer, SciTe and other stuff... I have to wonder whether the same amount of money and developer time, spent on these projects by the maemo team with its insider knowledge of Hildon, with outside people familiar with each project's code, wouldn't have given better results.
It may be a pipe dream of course, and sorry if this ruffles a few feathers in Helsinki, but it's possible there has been some sort of NIH syndrome at work here, at least initially.
PS: Actually you don't even have to bundle the PIM features with the tablets. Just make them readily available on Tableteer or somewhere, as "unsupported addons" -- as long as lazy reviewers can tick off the items from their check list, and user X can be told by user Z that yes, feature YYY is available, you're out of the woods :-)
Thanks for popping in and for a lively discussion. Take care, & hope to see you back soon !