Roadranger, as far as I know, its not only stripping out proprietary applications like opera. There's also closed stuff (like UI components) that are on a lower level, even hardware drivers IIRC.

I agree it would be the best thing to remove any proprietary stuff, therefore become completely independent of Nokias inhouse development and practically do whatever we want to do with both the 770 and the N800.

There is some work on its way, see Ångström as only one example. AFAIK, though, they all suffer from the problem that they cannot address all hardware in the device because there's simply no open driver for it.

A second option is to wait for Gnome Mobile&Embedded Platform to gain enough momentum. This could lead to an independent but still Maemo-like distribution that works on Nokias Internet Tablets - see Ubuntu Embedded for example.