The iPhone is a finished product. The product is the user experience. It doesn't matter what hardware it used or how you can access it. People buy it for the user experience and nothing more.

I would hazard a guess and propose that the majority of the target audience that the iPhone was designed for and subsequently most of the people who bought the iPhone would give a fig for the how and why it does what it does.

The NiT's and the N900 on the other hand are mostly used by people who are familiar with their capabilities and already know what the limitations of Maemo are from it's previous releases.

Maemo will never be polished.., because it is now evolving into MeeGo. What you see is what you get.

I don't use mine as a phone. I never have because I already have a company phone on a company network that isn't GSM so any thoughts I have about the phone side of it are based on reports from people who do use it as a phone.

What I have seen so far seems to be that if I did need the N900 to be my primary phone, I would be very disappointed.

Personally I had expected the phone functions to be at least on par with other Nokia phone offerings. Even if that meant a separate Symbian based phone side that communicated with Maemo through API's.
I would not care if these API's were closed or proprietary only that community developed Maemo apps had access to the Simbian API's as well.

Theoretically that can still happen from within the community but technically I don't know enough about the feasibility, or if Symbian Open Source even means what I think it means.

...but I'm drifting.

The answer to the OP's question is:

No, the N900 is never going to be a polished product.

I'm sorry some were mistaken in that regard.

For most legacy Maemo users this may have never been a reasonable expectancy for the NiT side of the N900. In my case the hardware, software, and connectivity improvements over the N800/810 means I use it much more than any previous NiT. (More hours per day, more bits downloaded, and more information processed.)

However, IMHO if the thing is sold as a phone, by the leading company that manufactures phones, it should function well as a phone and have the same polished features an average phone user expects.