I can't stop thinking we need a reference device. Badly. And it must be either something awesome or something cheap, so that many of us will get one.

I for one are not interested at all in tablet devices, I think they are just useless, cumbersome and offer much less than a similarly sized laptop. I would buy one only for the sake of maemo should it be the next reference device, but I wouldn't be able to spend much over $200 on it.

On the other hand I use my phone 18 hours a day, so I can muster a substantially larger amount of money for it. That said, I wouldn't mind a tablet-sized phone (as far as it fits in some kind of pocket)

I think this is true for most people (smartphone is almost a need nowadays, a tablet is a luxury). People will spend money on a phone anyway (even if they got a tablet), on the contrary many people I think would happily allocate their tablet money on a capable FREE phone.

Here comes another question now. How open are the newly born intel devices? Can nemo x86 run on the LePhone or the Lava? Do they have locked bootloaders etc? Is it possible to contact Intel or Lava or Lenovo and ask them to provide a number of devices preinstalled with Nemo for community purposes, at a lower price?
Can we just form a sort of legal entity with sole responsibility to obtain and resell Lava devices (if they are open enough) to community members?