Such a lame thread.

First of all, N900 did actually succeed pretty well in regards to their target audience: geeks and hardware enthusiasts.

Secondly, general populace was never the target audience and as such it was never optimized or designed with such audience in mind. Thus it's fairly obvious it would fail to appease to them.

Third, it was made clear from the get-go that N900 is more of an intermediary step and thus it would lack several features. The plan was to learn from N900 and whatever the community comes up with and use that experience in the making of a device actually aimed for more general usecases.

It's really simple and there is absolutely no point in even arguing about it. It wasn't aimed for Joe Sixpacks and thus Joe Sixpacks weren't really interested in it, and that's good IMHO. There's plenty of phones to suit such users, and while such phones may be inferior in our eyes the whole point of a phone is to suit its owner's needs, not to please all the rest.

EDIT: Fixed typo.