My friend who bought the N900 never have gone into the terminal. You don't have to unless you want to hack/mod the N900 or its apps. If you use it like a normal smartphone, it works like a normal smartphone. Obviously iPhone will never ever get flash support so if you want good web browsing experience, N900 is the best you'll get right now in such form factor. IMO, it is mass market ready. Well, the PR1.2 that eventually-someday-hopefully will arrive should make it pretty darn good. (the number of bug fixes and enhancements they put in is amazing)

Benefits of N900:
- hardware keyboard
- great integrations of IM and VOIP.
- being able to play xvid / wmv files without re-encoding
- Many free open source apps
- great web browser (also u can try firefox mobile / chromium etc)
- a decent 5MP camera with flash and video recording.

Well. Go with the platform you want. Android, iPhone4, Windows Mobile 6.5, Windows Phone 7, Samsung Bada etc etc.
To me, N900 has the best combination of hardware and OS currently available in the market. Nothing can compete with it imo.