herpderp: If it eases your mind, this is exactly what I believe.
Maemo is/was the only alternative platform that has something genuinely new to bring to the table since it consists mainly of open and free software.
= it replaces your desktop PC for most tasks that people do.
Also, so far, Maemo is the only platform that fully utilises the hardware it's on.

If Nokia had stood by Maemo a little bit longer (without the meego distraction) the tables would have been turned.
Most manufacturers would be coming to Nokia for a cross-licensing deal, to use Maemo instead of Android.
The platform is THAT much better, it's just a few of the programs that suck.
(which is not strange considering the short timeframe for development)

Since Nokia are among the best at hardware, It's in Nokias best interest to create a working open platform, even if they have to give it away for free.
I still admire the simplicity and versatility of the PCB in my E63 which was sold for 200eur; incredible hardware design.
I always thought that Nokia was planning a future "killer" phone by putting maemo on a simpler and more compact PCB.

People are currently having their honeymoon with "smartphones".
(Most buyers atm haven't owned enough different smartphones to make an educated evaluation of them, they just buy the shiniest one)
But, selling turd to farmers isn't a viable business model in the long run. And it's most certainly not a project that any real developers want to work on.

WindowsCE, IphoneOS, Android are just rehashes of the same rotten ideas.
Ideas that a phone is somehow different from a PC.
Sure, the UIs look nice, but no real developers want to work on those platforms.
Therefore most, if not all, software available for them is useless.

Meego was a huge effort just to rebrand and change to a worse package manager, and as everyone knows, developers do not take unnecessary change requests lightly. I'm pretty sure this caused major disruption and turmoil internally.

Also, I believe if a change in package manager was to be made, in the long run it would've been beneficial to change something like portage (as a C implementation).
That would've given Maemo a huge edge over anything the competition had to offer in the future.