The NIT are fine hardware. They're kick *** for linux savvy userse and linux hackers.

But without the commercial success (that many people here associate and compare with Apple products), there doesn't seem to be enough steam (incentives, motivation) in the NIT ecosystem.

The growth happens in sporadic fashion (distributed with minimum orchestration) as per the norm in the opensource developments. There are hints of greatness all over, but they take awhile to be rolled up into the official firmware if they will make it at all.

Let's do a simple exercise to roughly gauge the 'commercial success\acceptance' of NIT. Imagine 100 potential customers that represent the target market. Soccer moms, business suits, regular joes, students, etc.
Distribute N800 sets to them, one per person.

1. How many will get additional programs installed? (navigate to maemo.org and download, quite easy.)

2. How many will manage to find the best of breed programs installed? (do point #1 over and over to compare apps, or delve down to internet forums to join the confusion of distributed documentation).

3. How many do you think will get to run Skype on their unit? (flash their firmware).

How many of the 100 user will see NIT as the same device (developed to its potential) as most people on this forum see it as?

The way I see it, the NITs are awesome devices with almost limitless possibilities. But if they're not accessible to the user, it's useless to them.

(Yes, yes, they're not useless to you and me.)