It's unfortunate that Nokia is moving away from the maemo (hildon) UI. I found it to be very functional and intuitive, to the point that I even emulate some of its functionality on my (touch capable) Ubuntu netbook using compiz/cairo-dock, e.g. there is a permanent icon on the top left that calls "compiz shift" to show all current windows, just like on the N900.

Meego on the other hand feels cluttered and confusing (apparently an illness it inherited from Moblin). And no, those weird stylized humanoid figures on the backgrounds don't do it for me either. Hopefully they'll soon come up with a theme that looks "cool" or "smooth" instead of "weird" and "wtf?".

Sure, Meego is still in "beta" stage, but I was never as annoyed by the UI when testing maemo's beta images. Thus, after reading your description I have high hopes for Harmattan being much closer to maemo than Meego, and would probably buy the next Nokia device that comes with it (hopefully with a more up to date CPU, a 45nm Snapdragon would do nicely )..