N900 is a great platform, free as everyone is asking. The point is that is not for US because of the subsiding US people is looking to have.
700$ is the same price of an iPhone, the two are on the same league (more or less depending on the feature) but it seems that the marketing of 199$ + n hundreds $ in 2 years contract wins.
The only reason I can imagine (not being in US) for this being reasonable is that there is no reasonable dataplan without phone "embedded in".
S60 is OK from the user point of view (barring the UI from 1990), phones are cheap given the features, but programming for it is a nightmare...
Yes, I agree totally that S60 as a programming platform is horrible. I hope Nokia has learned the lesson with Maemo. Because it's based on a Linux distribution which is not that far from your standard desktop Linux, maybe they just aren't able screw that up too badly. To Nokia's credit they are not the open software development freedom-haters that Apple and maybe Palm now too have become.
OTOH, I don't think that Nokia really get open source in the same way that Google does. Doubtless, they have people that do, and their circumstances are quite different: Android can't be doing anything but losing money for Google, and is not really their core business anyway, whereas for Nokia, opening up their crown jewels cannot be an easy process. And Nokia has always been a bit ambivalent about open source. Google seems much clearer about what is and what is not going to be open source, which makes it a little bit easier to predict what they'll do and how they'll do it.
