I'm not too keen about having scrollbars take up screen space but it might be a good idea to be able to use arrow keys to scroll through long lists more quickly.
Similar to skipping in a video in mplayer. Where the left and right arrows are the smaller increments and the up and down arrows cause a bigger jump. Of course it would make sense to swap up/down with left/right in the list scrolling case =).

I think some people are overestimating how good scroll bars actually are. For a long list even on a desktop PC, I find scrollbars a PITA as they get less precise as the list gets longer (bigger jumps) and when you are talking about a 3.5" screen even in portrait mode, its no more useful than kinetic scrolling alone most of the time. That is one reason Windows Mobile sucks so badly, having to rely on scroll bars which are only useful when using the stylus because otherwise you don't have precise enough control with your fingers alone, no matter how large the scroll bar is.

Not supporting the arrow keys (as the N900 DOES have visual feedback showing a tiny scroll progress bar while scrolling) however is a stupid decision. This is Linux for crying out loud, there's supposed to be a thousand different ways to interact with it so you can use whichever you prefer (ways that do not waste screen real estate like scroll bars would).

Overall with decent sorting options, search, jump to letter/number, arrow key scrolling, it should be far more useful than scroll bars ever are.

Well it's not really a complaint, more like a suggestion.
You can easily satisfy everyone by given them options, and implement Arrow keys movement on top of kinetic is not impossible.

Bug has been reported and confirmed.
See https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6357

Please vote for fix

Another areas found with Arrow keys not implemented are:
1. Settings
2. Extended Menu screen (Menu -> More..)
3. Application Manager

You can easily imagine ways to have scrollbars without "wasting" screen real-estate; clicking on a icon on the screen to make them appear, for example. Scrollbars are useful when you want to jump to the middle of a 10000 lines document. Even though, it may not be precise (you can adjust by "finger-scrolling" to the exact line afterwards anyway), it beats having to kinetic/finger-scroll all the way to that line. I think these are UI subtleties that need to be ironed out by Nokia if they want to cater to the mainstream with this "new" platform.

Oddly, I quite like the scrolling. I suspect much of it is about 'knack'. With the pictures, for example, I can give a single flick and the entire thumbnail database will scroll continuously at a speed which I can take it in and 'pounce' on the image I want. The scrolll stops and I can double tap nicely. I wonder if this isn't one of thise 'muscle memory' things like prefering resistive to capacitive.

kinetic scrolling is great on the n900, but i still think the n97 kinetic scrolling is a little better. With the n900 when i'm touching the screen to began scrolling it sometimes would select what i'm touching. As where the n97 would need an extra click.

I guess i can say it's too sensitive but it is alot better then the touch and scroll on my 5800

Kinetic scrolling on N900 is too much jerky. Really low frame rate, it's starts to give me a headache. And that's present everywhere. I don't get it why? It has enough power for much better performance.
I thought it's going to be fixed in PR 1.1. Guess i was wrong.
I think i will report a bug.

Edit: Vote for bug 8017.

Works fine here, depends how fast you scroll too - if you scroll slow it might leave that impression.

It does have acceleration if you swipe faster but I agree there has to be another way for long menus too.

another thing i realized is that if you move more times (2x or 3x) fast in short time over the screen the scrolling is nearly "jumping".
for example in the app-manager. the list of apps is very long especially with testing and devel activated. but with quick swiping a few times i get too "z" in a blink of an eye. ^^

edit: you have to play around to find the perfect speed for you. to stop the scrolling simply tap on the touchscreen. (:

I know it isn't disaster but i'm not lying when i say it can be much better.
Especially the frame rate. I'm ok with the way of accelerating and all.