Congratulations - brave choice. Hopefully your wife will bring you the genuine N9 and not the fake double-SIM one.

You can have a lot of useful stuff working provided that you spend some time on configuration. That includes Twitter, Facebook, RSS feeds, dropbox and many many more, just like in modern smartphones.

Fortunately all necessary procedures are well documented here at talk.maemo.

Should you need advise on "must-have" apps, feel free to PM me.