MeeGo 1.0, I believe, had a lot of re-work done on the CORE OS to make the foundation of MeeGo releasable for people to work on.

The RPM subset, package names, dependencies, file paths, etc were all decided on and built.

MeeGo, actually at it's spirit, is just the raw OS that anybody can drop any UI on and go with. That was the whole point. MeeGo will have the QT there, but if a device manufacturer or whatever writes their own interface not in QT theres nothing stopping them from releasing a phone with that.. for example.

MeeGo 1.0 was a rush out the door to have a working foundation to build on, and they slapped Moblins UI with some modifications to it on top. Not all that big of a deal really.

I would venture that currently the hardest part of building a good linux distribution today is the UX. I mean hell, following LFS and the multitude of package management systems available, you can have an entirely custom Linux distribution up and running within a couple of days.. with all stock stuff (like KDE or Gnome with personalized extras) straight from upstream. Maintaining that distro.. that's another discussion altogether.

So, I imagine that - instead of making everyone wait for MeeGo 1.0 to get started on the framework, they built the core - took the UX they had, patched it to work on the new OS, made little changes here and there to say "Look, its new" and released 1.0. Now they have bought themselves more time to have a total re-write of the UI into QT (if that's the direction they are going) and people can still get started on developing or doing whatever they want with the MeeGo base + QT Framework.

Now.. why they didn't just slap on Maemo 5's GTK UX onto MeeGo and release a Handset 1.0 version at the same time; to buy time until the beta QT stuff is out this month for release in 6... that I dunno. Releasing the Netbook with the previous build but telling people they're SOL for Handset until the new stuff is ready seems a little biased to me...

(this is all personal opinion based on what I've seen and may be 100% completely inaccurate or off-base with any decisions actually made regarding Nokia/Intel and MeeGo.)