Thank you for this question, patlak, for it catalyzed (or joined an epiphany regarding the situation in my (aching, thick) head.

There are indeed two points of view here -- that of the end consumers, and that of the developers and people professionally involved with Nokia (not discussing the shareholder's position, which is represented by a less vocal group). Your question is from the point of view of the end consumer -- what will the change to WP7 bring to the market, and are we going to want to buy it. The answer is, for most people here, likely NO, we will not want any of it. WP7's philosophy is polarly opposite to that of Maemo/Meego, and if we liked this philosophy we'd be happy with iOS gadgets and not spend time on TMO. So no wonder why many people here are turning to Android (the lesser evil). But we have always been a very small group that barely affects the market.

The other point of view is that of Nokia and those working for / with it. Shrinking market share in the much larger Symbian segment had to be addressed somehow. Qt was a feasible solution, but apparently it wasn't working for Symbian as expected. So the board decided to replace Symbian with WP7, a decision about which I couldn't care less because I have never been interested in Symbian devices anyway.

Now, the conflict arises from the fact that Qt and Meego are incompatible and compete directly with WP7, so when Symbian goes they are canned as well. From the point of view of Nokia this is really unimportant, Meego being just an experimental platform with zero market share. From the point of view of most end users on TMO it is the world.

In the end of the day, for Nokia, it was never about Meego being ready or not. They will get it ready in some form, but they cannot keep it as more than an experiment since it will contradict the move to WP7 in the lower segment. It is simpler to have both lower and higher end phones running on WP7.

I guess I can now leave the conspiracy theories alone, suck it up and move on. Let's hope we get a decent successor to the N900 -- the first and last Meego phone from Nokia, but c'est la vie. If it has a screen larger than 3.5'', I'll buy it.