I think one of the concerns, and often rightfully so, is that the end of an OS (no further support from the manufacturer) means that third-party developers of 'commercial grade' applications (and yes, there are of course some apps that are free and rivals commercial ones) will have no interest in updating and/or releasing products for the platform. That became evident really quickly for for instance the N810 and support of applications such as Skype.

For Maemo5 it will mean the same now. Games is a good example as high quality games (graphics, stable, etc) are very hard to get outside of the commercial, larger companies. There might well be Qt ports, community developments, etc but closed-source, commercial applications will now not come to any Maemo platform.

I know that it's popular to say that 'the phone still works the same in 6 months as it does today' - but for some people community development and hacks/mods are not enough as they also value products outside of what an open source community on a small platform can deliver. For those people a discontinuation of a phone (and in this particular case - an OS at the same time) does indeed make it much less valuable. How many times can one really play Angry Birds and sit by and watch mainstream applications and games come to your iOS, Android platforms - and not feel left out?

I'm not saying that community development and ooen sourced apps and games are bad - some are very, very good but I think it's unfair to continue to repeat that tired chant 'the phone will still continue to work' as there are more aspects than that to consider.