You probably misunderstood what "pushing it out to devices" means. Most likely they meant just "making it available for devices through Ovi store".

The mechanism through which something could be pushed is having an application as dependency to another package (e.g. regional metapackage). Please check "apt-cache rdepends fifaschedule" on your xterm. I tried it on mine, and there were no dependencies.

There is also a log available in Application Manager, check the menu.

Theoretically, this might be because of current problems with n900 & Ovi store. Let's see if we get news about them soon.

If you are really paranoid, you can use only apt-get to install packages. It will always show the full explanation of what will be done. Apart from application manager, there is no "back door" that Nokia would be using to remote control your device. And for application manager, the source code is available at gitorious.