These are wise words!

My laptop has an ATI Xpress video subsystem - ATI have decided it is legacy software and as a result the I lose the 3D-accelerated goodness from ATI's driver on later versions of Xorg. I have to rely on the open-source drivers to give me decent performance on my laptop. Great for compiz effects p*** poor for games.
Unfortunately ATI have no plans to release the full specs of my legacy device or willing to release the source code of the drivers. This situation will not change in the immediate future.
I either stay with an old distribution and keep 3D performance for games or install a current distribution and lose great 3D performance but access to the latest versions of software. I had to choose the later otion because I do not have the time to build packages for an older version of a linux distribution.

I really hope Nokia decide to support the n900 closed-source drivers in some way by:

(a) releasing the source under an open-source license.
(b) releasing linkable binary blobs
(c) officially supporting the n900 via MeeGo
(d) helping the community to write open-source versions of the drivers.

(a) or (d) would be ideal because it will allow people to experiment with custom-installs of other distributions (e.g. Install Debian and still be able to use the phone functionality)
I don't think (a) will ever happen - e.g. there are probably third party licensed software and patent issues)

But the closed-source nature of some of the n900 hardware will hold it back and it will be unlikely we'll see a fully working n900 device under MeeGo.

I hope Nokia do the right thing and remove this "restriction" in some way.