I for one agree with you, I'm happy and even mildly excited to see that there is still a Linux distro for handsets and internet tablets and that it will eventually, probably, become the standard platform. I like this, it's cool, but it's not something that affects me in any real way right now.

The fact Meego is still not day-to-day usable on the only platform I have, the N900 (well it wasn't when I last looked before Christmas, it may be now, I'll have to test again) means that I have no real involvement in (and therefore excitement about) what's happening.

Yes I know I could get involved doing platform development and bugfixing stuff, but looking at the #meego-arm meetings, it seems to me that there are lots of people who are paid to do platform development there, so my sticking my oar in and distracting them asking what I could do with a paltry hobbyist 1h/day seems pointless.

Meego application development is another option, and I do this anyway for Maemo (and it should apparently be reasonably easy to port over with the new SDK, etc.) Working on the Meego reference apps seems rather pointless as the next Nokia handset will use its own UI so we are led to believe (and replace those reference apps), so unless we have some hardware on which we wish to just run the reference implementation of Meego, this would be wasted time.

Now yes, the N900 is such a platform, but it is getting rather long in the tooth, there is some pretty impressive hardware out there these days - bigger screens, faster processors, twin core processors, more RAM, etc., and it would be nice to have some of this new stuff to play with (running Linux of course).

So I'm personally just waiting for some new hardware that looks suitable (big screen, hw kb, camera, compass, gps, etc.) and will run Meego, then I'll get more enthused actually using it and being able to develop for it (and feeling that the work I do will have some sort of lifetime on the device in question.)