Here's what happened. I hope that I don't go over your head... and if I seem to be talking down to you, it's not what I intended. I'm just trying to make sure everyone understands.

Maemo is based upon an older version of GTK, which is a graphical toolkit. What Nokia has been doing is taking an older version of GTK and attaching patches to it to get more features. Well, what happens when you have a program that relies on a current version of GTK? Well, you have to rewrite parts of it to work on the N800.

Chinook, IT 2008, has GTK 2.10 (instead of, I believe GTK 2.8 or 2.6). That's the current version of GTK. Because of this change, Nokia can keep GTK on our tablets updated with the latest feature updates that GTK gets as well as deliver their changes and improvements upstream.

The fact that we're going to be on a current version of GTK makes porting much easier for the average programmer. Only a few calls need to be changed and bingo, you have your program running on IT 2008. This alone will probably result in us getting a lot more ported programs and also in getting more GTK programmers interested in doing work on the tablets.

The one and only bad thing about this change is that older programs will need to be recompiled and changed a little bit to work on the newer GTK. We've been told that the changes should be relatively easy and painless. Also, the Chinook SDK beta was released early to help give developers a jump-start on porting to IT2008.

In short, it's a bit of a pain now, but it's going to definitely be worth it in the long run. (You can also blame the GTK devs for making such major changes between minor revisions of GTK, but I digress...)

Edit: By the way, all of this also applies to those who upgrade their N800s to IT 2008. But that's why they released the SDK early, so that when the tablet/new OS hits, we could already have versions of our apps already done and working.