I get the feeling we're talking about different things here.

If you mean to say that Maemo/Hildon is a crappy GUI, then I'm with you all the way: It sucks dinosaur bollocks.

But if you're insisting that there should be only One True GUI on Nokia's Internet Tablets, then: Sorry, dude, you've lost me. I believe that, if anything, we should have more GUIs on the tablets: portable Gnome, OpenMoko, heck why not OpenEinstein. They're all good.

You see, the iPhone (<spit!>) is a consumer package: You pay for what you get, which is a lot of shiny, polished stuff, but what you see is what you get.

The tablets are tools to get stuff done. What the stuff is you want to get done, is up to you, not Nokia. And Nokia is -- admittedly slowly -- starting to grok that in a way that Apple sadly has lost. Sure, I b*tch about the lack of gloss, the crappiness of the GUI, the idiocy of Killer Firmwares, but the last thing I want is for my b*tching to result in Nokia going the Apple way.

Look at it this way: Every app that hangs your tablet, is (cue soppy music) a testimony of your freedom; every button that lags for half a second asserts you as a proud, non-fruity, independent computer user; every zany toolbar impudently proclaims: "I belong to a geek!"

Hold your head high! <snif! snif!>