Other phones don't have Maemo ,
other phones are smart phones, not computers.

Smartphones in their current incarnation are dumbed down pocket computers with a closed operating system. Their makers like the user to believe it is a phone that can do some other fancy computer stuff while the computing end mainly serves marketing purposes at full power.

Smartphones are transition devices on the way to a low end place in the line up where the high end will be a fully configurable do all pocket computer of which you have the early type in your hands.
It will have full desktop OS security options , firewall options, privacy protection and everything user controlled and yes it can be dumbed down to suit all levels of users even, preconfigured or custom.

The N900 is a computer. It can do stuff that sometimes saves me the effort to drag along a laptop, headset, photo camera, mobile phone etc...
I have spent a working day in a bar with my colleagues and contacts thinking I was behind my laptop working on location.

Nokia N900 big fault is that it wasn’t available 10 years earlier when I still would have cared to impress my colleagues at the moment they were gathered around the first porn page in WAP displayed on the new Nokia 7110. Anyway on that day I knew the wait would still be long.


btw:
The apple laptop I type this on has always outdated hardware but the software suits my needs more than what I would get if my primary goal was to be king of hardware specs.