what?

no no no. you own the device. and you have nokia's blessing to do anything you want to it. meego is open source and you have meego.com's blessing to download, hack, install, or fork it in any way you wish.

legality is not the concern. liability is. nokia says "for developers only" because they dont want to be liable for real or perceived damage to the n900 by either correctly or incorrectly installing meego on it. they could also say "you can format the drive and try to install windows xp on the device, but only if you're a developer and accept full responsibility".

see, it's just not their problem if it doesn't work. and further, they are saying that if you break your n900 by trying to install stuff they didn't give you specifically to install, then they can't honor any warranty.

thats it. period. no laws being broken, no hurt feelings, etc. it is actually in nokia's best interest if you go ahead and try meego, because maybe (just maybe) you'll notice a bug or ask why something works/fails the way it does and cause the developers to fix or change something that improves meego for everyone. and then that bug is fixed before nokia ever tries to ship a meego device.