Actually, it's not even that, it's simply that it's made by Microsoft. Palm devices actually had better Office file support (through Docs to Go) than Pocket PC devices for a long time, but Microsoft kept telling businesses that their mobile OS was more compatible because they made it. Eventually, most businesses bought the hype.

Well, that and the fact that Pocket PC gave them miniature but apparently genuine versions of Word, Office, Excel etc. The ability to use the same applications on every platform is a powerful incentive, even if it's a lie.

But if the Nokia tablets had office support it would help bump some people across -- those who like the Nokia tablets but can't convince themselves to buy.

The ability to view Office files should really be considered part of any Internet compatible device, like the ability to view PDF files or even JPGs and MP3s. It's not about catering to business users.

Now that there's the GarnetVM for Maemo, it looks like Maemo will be as Office Compatible as Palm is.

I agree entirely. There are quite good Qtopia apps, for example, that could have been a good starting point for a Maemo application, if it wasn't for the fact that it's for an entirely different API. And so on. Lots of effort spread over incompatible widget sets. And Hildon could probably have been hidden more deeply into the gtk/gnome-based system so that applictions didn't have to be "hildonized" as much (or at all..).

For the Linux desktop this diversity doesn't really matter, as you can run anything on everything. It's probably a good thing in fact. It's a very different situation for mobile devices though.

The trick with Android, is that the apps aren't really Java. You code in Java, you compile to .class and .jar files and such - but then at build time the tools translate the java bytecode to some proprietary 'optimized' .dex bytecode. So you'd have to port their custom 'dalvik' VM to piggy-back off the Android developer community. Which I'd guess is proprietary, and definitely includes a good pile of libraries and interfaces that are.

Also, I get the feeling that their VM makes assumptions about the underlying phone architecture. At least insofar as chipsets, processing speed, bandwidth, etc. It's possible that even if Nokia partnered with the OHA that the NITs wouldn't match up with the required specs. (I'd be most concerned about the lack of video bandwidth and the still-untapped 3d capabilities)

So... I wouldn't hold out much hope. The best that we can hope for, is that someone will make a fast javaVM for maemo, and make it easy enough for Android projects to port to maemo.

I thought forum Nokia was like the biggest developer community in the world. Or is it just for Symbian?

If nokia was to completely open up their platform from ground to bottom stacks under the GPL they would have an advantage with the real FOSS community over Android who uses an Apache v2 license which i'm pretty sure will be used and abused by the carriers trying to gain a competitive edge over the others... That will slow them down even if they have 100 more programmers, we could all share code on everything and always give back.
They make money on hardware and service not software after all...

(I'm not trying to start a BSD vs GPL here, but in a context where the main group pushing a BSD like license is a comercial entity, i doubt it will be a success...YMMV)