linux on a phone is a huge step to make. so i am glad nokia tried it. nevertheless i think thats a step you have to do completly or not. halfways is imo hard.

what do i mean with that: what they do is take a unix and change half of the os to behave different. if you do that you get into the situation that all the software provided by others expecting the "normal" behavior gets broken. additionally devs of such software will not fix such problems for they go for standard behavior. so you don't have(or few) the devs that just port their app for the phone and the other way round the stuff created for the phone(even more so if it is propretary) will not get into a state to be used as a base for develepement.
and they did neither: create everything(which would be realy a lot to do) nor left the possibility to use somthing others created. and that leaves a gap.

i think they learned a little from their mistakes as i see quite a change in the behaviour now with meego. its a lot better. but still has the issue. its not a customization but a whole os. and if you do a whole os you are again bound to do that: the whole thing.

otherwise you had by now a lot of operating systems working on the phone for the user with all the software that comes with it. you had a customizable desktop and user who would use the look and feel they like by just installing it and would love it.
users could use just the application they wanted and would not require devs to rewrite sofware for a single phone, which they won't do not even support for its non standard. with all that you would see a phone which would beat every other phone in usability.

hardware: its a highend phone with highend core. but that stuff is put together in realy bad quality. the result is a device which is potentioally capable of a lot more than it is. result is a device that has issues in many usecases.

also it feels like they got into timepressure in the end and instead of postponing the release to finish it up, they just released a product with workarounds. at least it feels like that: started and planned great but in the end failed to really do it right(at first i thought: they replaced the capable folks who started it with incapable folks at some time - thats how it feels.).

sure it's a big step to make and well don't mourn: it's at least a start.