Palm Pre Plus specs:

500 MHz Texas Instruments OMAP 3430 (ARM Cortex A8 + PowerVR SGX)
512mb RAM
16gb internal storage

Only the screen and CPU clockspeed is really lesser than the stock N900.

I'm sure there are other differences, but the hardware between the N900 and Palm Pre Plus is rather similar. There's been a few other folks around here that's stated the same.

The move of their SDK to HTML/CSS/JavaScript means that a lot of webdevs could have picked it up. It's the lowest common denominator in terms of development.

Palm had a lot of gaffes though, lack of software from the start, lack of games, and some other things. But the point is though that they had the marketing - weird marketing in the US, but they were marketed.

Nokia and marketing do not belong in the same sentence in North America and Japan. To see them pull just that part off (marketing), I'll be surprised.