N900 has your bread-and-butter udev, hald and some other nifty Linux stuff too - that's why there's no need to hide the µSD reader under the battery but it can be hot-pluggable and the previous tablets had USB host mode too. Several other mobile OSes have abandoned the "possibly dynamic, but maybe not" hardware approach, but it has been retained in Maemo - which is only a good thing (in my opinion, at least - making stuff fixed always makes it more difficult to port and debug).

Just FYI, at least some flash cards *are* content-aware and assume FAT. That is, if they think they see what amounts to "file deleted", they will read what they think is "file blocks" and pre-erase those blocks.

I would assume though, that these devices would not work in the desktop machines either.

In this case, he says they work fine in the Desktops, just not in maemo.