Not entirely true although there is still a $50 registration fee, registered company or individual. After that it's pretty much free/no cost - signing, distribution etc. It's a bit late in the day but Nokia really are now trying to make app distribution as easy and painless as possible. You can even get Nokia to pay you to develop your app...

If you're distributing a free app on Maemo then yes why bother with the $50 one off fee - just use the extras repository, but if you decide to charge (or want to distribute on Symbian too) then it's a no brainer and hopefully you'll be very rich (or at least get your $50 back!)