You can't be further from the truth. Maemo is in almost every way different than Android, they are similar only by the name of their kernel, and even then Google stripped out a lot of the one going into Androids making it increasingly difficult to upstream.

If they were any similar, I'd be running Android now and Maemo would be a fuzzy, albeit warm memory.

N900 was never mentioned to be a flagship, not even a mass-user device, and its hardware was more than adequate for the time of its conception (early 2009, it was HW complete long prior to its release).

On the same hardware - no way. No matter how good VM you build, no matter how optimized its JIT pathways are, you can't beat native execution. And manufacturers didn't choose to run non-GPU accelerated graphics on their Android devices (original Droid has the same GPU as the N900, yet its not used for UI acceleration) - Google chooses that for them. Android does not support GPU acceleration (it will, eventually, they keep putting it off for each new version). Of course, they'll conveniently say that the manufacturers should include their optimizations all by themselves if they want to accelerate their UIs, but that is just to mask the original problem - that Android is still just a glorified virtual machine. GPU acceleration hooks should exist in gfx drivers (just like those exist for video acceleration), and then there would be no problem, but that makes writing drivers longer and would require a good revamp of the Dalvik stack which Google seems to put off for years now.

Please inform yourself prior to making statements such as these.