To many and nokia itself, the n900 (a piece of innovation from the engineers) seemed to be a FLOP to general users. Why?

In this official thread n900 Flops thread
http://forum.dailymobile.se/index.php?topic=23482.15

One user mentioned something like " I want everything to just work".

Thats the thing ? Just Like Apple or Banana or whatever, people just want it to work. With n900 one has to work hard, and the rewards are tremendous. (example: I spent a whole day freeing up around 113 MB on the rootfs). General people dont know what is a " MB ", let alone rootfs. With the introduction of siri on banana, in upcoming years people will forget how to optimize and get more than you bargained for, if you work hard. They are pushed far in to the interface and we are pushed far inside the core.

The gap between users and programmers keeps increasing.