I'm kind of scratching my head here.

So they build a device with almost twice the screen diagonal of the N900, (due to scaling) they still have a lower resolution, and on top of that they have to reduce the available screen space even further because they need an on-screen keypad.

Add to that the horribly space-wasting Gnome UI, and working in a terminal will basically fell like using an 80's one-line electronic typewriter.