You're absolutely right. Still, just like the proprietary and semi-proprietary OSes ship with a basic set of apps and features that are expected to be more secure and automatically update during the life cycle of the OS, MeeGo (or whatever it morphs into) should have similar a set.

And for many a well-designed basic set is simply enough. That's the kind of phone I would recommend to my 40+ year-old friends and relatives. 99% of them don't need fart apps (like kids might do) nor do they have the time or understanding to start evaluating thousands, let alone tens of thousands of apps often of relatively suspicious origin. It's still by and large an untapped market.

Same with the enterprise market. They need security and (in-house) custom apps, both easily provided by MeeGo, rather than access to a sprawling fishy app jungle.

With MeeGo Nokia could've offered their services package as a default offering available to any generic phonemaker using standard MeeGo and it's not difficult to offer more generous revenue-sharing terms than Apple or Google.