I actually bought a Nokia N900 running Maemo. It sucked. Getting a desktop GNOME/Linux stack to work right on phones is a huge amount of work — maybe almost as much as writing Android from scratch (it's hard to tell due to the budget disparity).
Unpolished sure but I have to disagree that it sucks. I've solely used an N900 for the last 3 years now. The power of maemo for me overrules the occasional frustrations - I'm just kind of worried about what I'll do if I break it.
