I miss the smart dialer of Windows Mobile.
It'll be great to have the dialer picking up the names of contacts when you input few letters from their names or the first few numbers of the phone number using the dialing pad.

Is there a way to suggest this to Nokia?

don't have an n900 but that was one of my favorite features of wm...

Yes. Put them in Brainstorm for consideration to be implemented.

Update:
I've put this idea in Brainstorm @ http://maemo.org/community/brainstor...ctive_dialler/

From what I hear if you start typing on the "desktop" it'll search contacts

It does, but that's not one handed operation friendly.

Pretty neat feature, yeah.
Isn't it possible to search in the phone application after you clicked on available contacts, or can you only scroll through them?
After I've seen some stuff, I would say the phone application is pretty basic at this point. I think the devs didn't want to spend any more resources on that, because it just works fine and there are other open points, that do not and are more important.
New fw releases will do it. The maemo team seems pretty much reliably developing brainstormed features, so if I were you, I'd just wait and see if the winter update will already bring us a reworked phone app.