Come on, Maemo has a few badly optimised apps, unluckily they are the ones used most on a phone, apart from those, it's quite fast.
There's absolutely no reason Maemo couldn't be 10x-30x faster than now, if devs would just bother pointing out culprits and optimising them.

Android on the other hand, is hampered by it's VM.
Wishful thinking or (insert new coding paradigm buzzword) isn't going to change that.
Even on an intel atom 1.6GHz it runs like Maemo on a really bad day.
Allowing ring0 access for userland programs is a REALLY bad idea, it just goes to show how misguided the Android project is, no wonder they get their *** handed to them when they try to send patches to Linux. But to each their own.

Some good news:
Nokia entering the free software phone business was scaring off potential competition.
Now there is a market again for the many small start-ups that are developing Linux phones.
This might turn into something good in the end