I just wanted to say that from the direction it seems Meego is going it looks like that WILL be polished and I am quite worried about that. As said previously, the more polished a device is the less configurable it tends to be and from what I have seen of the Handset UI I don't like the look of it.

One example of why flexibility requires compromise resulting in a "less polished" feel:

So why is the N900 app manager slow?
Because its entirely Linux based and Linux package management is designed to be plug and play, allowing you to add whatever software sources you want.

In order to do that it has to refresh those sources every time you open the app manager because there is no way it can know what has changed.

It has to update each one separately and then collate the results of all the sources together so you can search them or view a list. Part of collating those results it also has to check versions (as the same application may be available from several sources with different versions such as extras ,extras-testing, extras-devel), they may require other packages as well to function (Linux is based on a very varied collection of shared libraries), so it has to check everything matches up alright before you can do anything.
Naturally, this takes a long time and uses a lot of disk IO and CPU power, not helped by the fact that the N900 doesn't exactly have the fastest eMMC in the world (seeing as a good SSD alone would cost half the price of the N900, not something Nokia could fix unless you wanted a $1000 device). Just try booting your desktop PC from a USB stick or SD card and see how slow it gets (that is installing your OS on there not a Live CD/USB as those cheat by putting everything in RAM).

Why is the Apple App Store so polished?
Apple only have a single software repository, so they don't even need to bother pushing that list to your device - you can just browse it on the web which I believe is all the App Store does. Then when you request a file, it just pushes you that file nicely wrapped in DRM.

When you write for iPhone you are writing for the existing libraries, so it doesn't have to check the right things are installed/available to install, like Linux does. However it also means if the OS doesn't support what you want to do, you are out of luck or have to bundle it into your application making it more complicated and bigger.

In fact, its pretty much how Ovi Store works too (minus the DRM of course) so if you removed the ability to install community software the N900 would be faster too. Of course the problem with Ovi is that once it comes to installing the package you just downloaded, it still has the do all the normal Linux stuff BEFORE it can install - to make sure everything is configured right and available. If we ONLY had Ovi Store, the N900 app manager would be as fast as the App Store, but we wouldn't have the community driven software development that we have. You only have to look at a jailbroken iPhone to see that, it has a community software development and guess what - it has the same "unpolished" problem with its application manager too, for the same reasons. At least we didn't have to hack our phones and risk breaking compatibility with the stock OS in order to get there.

This is just one example of how the flexibility of the OS causes it to feel less polished.