This first step is is all about marketing, get the Jolla brand name out there. Meego is a name that people know about, and in general associated with the critically acclaimed N9. So the fact that those Meego division workers, who built the N9, have formed Jolla is a concept that the technoratii can understand and buy into and thus help generate a buzz around the new company.

Now I accept that in reality Harmattan is built on a maemo core and apparantly Nokia had to argue to get Meego compliance, but if you read the general tech articles about the N9, they nearly always say Meego phone. These lazy/ignorant-about-maemo-and-meego tech journalists will know very little about mer, heck go read through the irc #mer logs from the last couple of days and see how many people going there with a n900 think that mer = nemomobile so might = jollamobile, to see how confusing the whole story is for the uninitiated.

And in reality it's not even a lie to call it Meego based. The Meego code was used as the basis for the mer project, as was the Meego community ethos. They've also been clear to say that they're building their platform on the mer core.

One of the next steps will be to launch their os name and device codename, this will be the time when they lessen the emphasis on Meego, but even then they will need to keep the name in the back of people's minds to help them understand the Story.

As a contrast, the buzz around Vivaldi was fantastic, but the story didn't generate the same level of excitement in non-linux circles because the story there was KDE, not mer, not Meego. Maybe they missed a trick .