I was merely talking about the capabilities of the HW and the base OS as supplied by Nokia. Sorry if I didn't make that clear enough.
In that regard (HW+OS) the N900 is superior to the N8x0 in every aspect, except maybe screen size (where it's debatable whether bigger or smaller is better for a mobile device).

Maybe because nobody capable enough was interested enough in actually doing it.
The N900 may have been a step up from the N8x0, but basically it was just a reiteration of the same idea. So everybody who just made something for the N8x0 to see if it could be done had little incentive to repeat that for the N900.

I was late to the party, so I didn't have that experience with the N8x0. But when I started toying around with ED (which was some weird Lenny/Squeeze chimera back then), I just found it hard to believe that it should be impossible to get it all on a sane package base.
So I started to dig deeper out of pure curiosity and learned about all (well most) of the "magic" that was going on there. Becoming a de facto dev was absolutely not my initial intention and I might have never gotten to a point of knowing how to assemble working images, had ED been in perfect shape when I started using it.