I don't believe this news was related to Qt, which is a common framework for the development of applications, not Operational Systems.

From what I understood, they are talking about a common SW platform to run both Symbian and Linux O.S. (they are even considering Android too) on different HW, maybe something like a hypervisor. Even with Meego, there is a layer on which you have to develop the drivers for your specific hardware used on the device.

For example, a bluetooth or Wi-Fi controller chipset may execute the same basic functions, but there are many suppliers for this same chipset and each mobile vendor chooses one and thus have to adapt the drivers. My guess is that they are aiming to reduce this effort on the operational system layer, while Qt aims to solve the cross-compatibility issue between different OSes.