That first link is the only one I can reasonably believe is true. A8 chips are mid-range chips now, and if Nokia wants to play in the high end, they have to play Motorola/HTC/Samsung's game because they certainly can't play Apple's.

I suspect that, if true, then behind the scenes an A8 device was born and died, and along with it MeeGo-Harmattan did as well. If they were planning to use a Debian-style filesystem with Debian packaging, then they would be out of compliance with the spec and not permitted to use the MeeGo brand, and that would dilute it more than anything.