Haha, at least he put it in talk general.

On balance, Nokia gets a lot of bashing for their excruciating cruft,
but the OP has a point - a big company putting a telephone into
a linux computer meant that some people put some serious effort
into bending some financial ears.

After struggling uphill upstream for the past few years
just trying to justify a few critical-app linux machines in an organization
that is owned, managed and populated by M$-worshiping sycophants
I can really appreciate the problems of getting closed-source minds
to even tolerate open-source frameworks.

The Nokia effort has made an effort which is covered with warts
and lipstick, but the fundamental fact remains that the basic
premise was actually marketed has been an epic landmark.
(NB - Android is simply just a poor imitation using a hacked kernel
that actually looks like an effort to undermine linux standards
with a closed-garden javacode ripoff rather than an actual OSS fork.

The only alternative to the n900 with its closed-source bits
is hacking phone-hardware and drivers etc. into a tablet computer
which would really be a pig with lipstick.
Furthermore, judging by the gear that is out there this is still
something which could be done but there would be no community
and would also be quite difficult to achieve in practice.