I'll raise you a concise question: So?

Assuming by "2 month old phone" you mean anything other than the N900, that proves nothing, and if you do mean the N900, I still return to the "so" bit, because even if my better performance has something to do with kernel vm tweaks and the like, at the end of the day it's still the same argument - someone said "The N900 can run 30 apps" (implicitly - can run them well) - you said "go run 30 browser pages" - the two points - A, without background crap clogging your system, it runs far more webpages without lag/slowness than other current phones do, and B, 30 apps doesn't equal 30 browser windows, as those can often be flash add, javascript, and the like, bloated, as well as being optimized for desktop viewing on desktop hardware (I.E., not optimized at all, more or less).

Point is, 30 webpages being slow and laggy doesn't mean there aren't perfectly practical situations when the N900 will run 30 programs that you're actually using (and not just running for the lol-look-at-how-much-I'm-running-on-my-phone factor), with decent performance. Is there slowness? Yes, if you push it. But if you want it to be pretty and shiny and responsive like an iPhone, just run it like an iPhone with one app at a time, and the result will be similar.

Ummm... I've drained iPhones in 2 hours with non-stop CPU-heavy usage too. Doesn't really mean anything. I've also drained my laptop in 2 hours with heavy CPU-usage. (Not that my laptop is "high-end" enough to expect hours upon hours of high-performance uptime, but whatever.)

Seriously, if you take an N900 that's relatively "clean" of background tasks/daemons/programs, and I suspect you'd see similar if not better uptime in CPU-heavy use-cases to iPhones/etc. Especially if you only run one task at once ever. Though I'd love to hear comparisons of multitasking jailbroken iPhones vs. an N900 running the same/similar stuff at once.

Actually, that is minimizing - putting something in the background. "State-saving" is the most common term I know for freezing all the background stuff.

That said, there's plenty of uses for having crap run in the background. Maybe I have a flash game that's loading and I want to go type up something on an essay I'm working on in FreOffice or whatever while it loads (given that I'm probably the only one writing essays in FreOffice on the N900 regularly, replace that with typing a text message or something). Maybe I don't have a song/podcast/whatever on my device, but want to listen to a youtube video of it - I sure as hell don't want to sit there and stare at the webpage, effectively paralyzing my device from doing anything else useful.

Wait. That's kinda genius. Yes you can have both (not can in the practical sense of it being available on some device already, but can as in, when you think about it, there's no reason for it not to be an option). Just give users one more button in the UI next to close/minimize/maximize/whatever that state-saves the program instead. This would do wonderfully on mobile/embedded devices... Might be a nice feature to have on desktops too... Nice enough that I feel that it should be implemented into the Linux ecosystem as soon as possible and people who don't want to use it can continue not to use it. If only I had the expertise I'd actually be very motivated to try to implement this in Maemo right now.