I think no, N9 was not wanted to be a device with hardware keyboard... but yes, it had a brother running the same OS, with hardware keyboard and it was called N950 - that was abandoned by Nokia somewhere at production-ready state when Microsoft had acquired the company and stopped potential competitors of Windows Phone then. By that time practically the future of the whole Maemo line had destroyed (basically the source codes have "evaporated"). Some successors are trying to grow up but a good phone with hwkb is... maybe growing nowadays.