The Symbian^3 phones could run maemo as the Cortex A8 CPU/GPU combo is clocked at 600Mhz and the Maemo UI is GPU accelerated.

Comparitively, the Symbian^3 devices are clocked at 680Mhz and the Broadcom GPU is more powerful that the SGX in the A8, and as an aside, Symbian^3's UI is GPU accelerated.

In theory, as Maemo is GPU accelerated, it should run better on the 680Mhz+Broadcom GPU combo than the 600Mhz A8+SGX combo.

The SGX530 in the N900 does 14 Million polygons a second and the Broadcom BCM 2727 in Symbian^3 phones does 32 Million polygons per second.

Sure, there are other factors such as the efficiency of either CPU core (A8 v Arm11) but the Symbian^3 hardware as a whole is infact more powerful that the N900 hardware.

I own a N900 since Feb 2010, a N8 since Dec 2010 and my C7 Astound is on the way in the mail. I will say this, the camera abilities of the N8 cannot be matched by any device. You will have to see the intelligent HD digitial zoom in action. You will never look at a cellphone camera the same again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-vXF3t1qrU