Well, I didn't flash it yet however I did M32GB Maemo variant and booted a new kernel multiple times.

This is what you do to upgrade the OS right? I did this once shortly after I bought the device to upgrade to "Diablo" and it certainly didn't seem hard. Follow some instructions from Nokia, download a file to my computer and plug in the tablet. That was the one and only time I did that, and to be honest I don't even know if that was really necessary for the types of things I use it for. Certainly don't know why a normal user would want or need to flash their device multiple times (is this something I should be doing for some reason?)

By doing a youtube app that looks cute, oh, wait, you did it.

Grettings.

Actually, the main problem here is not that Maemo is hard to figure out, it is that Maemo doesn't restrict how you use the device. For example, on an iPhone, all the user can do is execute tiny little apps. A user can say "ooh, cool, look at the pretty app!", but they cannot actually do anything that might mess up the machine in any way. (In fact, it's nearly impossible for a user to gain direct access to any data _at all_ in iOS; everything is mediated through tightly-controlled apps.) Steve Jobs has been a huge advocate of the "computer as toaster" concept from the very beginning, and has never wanted to allow users anywhere near the guts of Apple devices. And so, Apple products are considered safe for use by the general public.

And maybe they're right. When I talk to friends and family about their modern high-tech devices, they normally fall into two camps -- either they're too scared to even touch the thing in the first place (worried that they'll never learn enough to understand how to use it), or they immediately start pressing buttons at random, and then howl in indignation when something goes wrong. There are just a lot of people out there who don't want to learn how to use a device...

I knew I'd get this incredulous response.

First, it isn't possible to have a decent N900 inless you use apps from exrras-devel and testing. Many essential apps are there, but it is true that you can occasionally get into trouble using them, and flashing is often the best quick fic.

If you are skeptical that flashing is much trouble, you might check out the hundreds of threads proving that it can be.

Flashing is often handy if you are running Nitdroid or booting from an MMC, too.

If you run into weird problems with your tablet in general, flashing is often the best fix.

If you just like experimenting in general, flashing can be necessary.

Dude, please stop, I can't breathe. That picture is killing me.

Yeah, I'm incredulous too. Even without extras-devel and extras-testing, I think the N900 is a decent device.

And yeah, I've never flashed my device. I don't need to squeeze every last ounce of CPU out of it with custom kernels, nor do I really mess with the iffier apps under development. That doesn't mean I don't do anything with it; I'm editing files with Vim, ssh-ing into my home network, playing with shell scripts, multitasking with browsers and media players, etc.

You can still do a lot with the machine without ever tripping over something that would require it to be reflashed. I expect someday I'll try it out just to see how it works, but I haven't yet done anything that required me to flash the device, and I don't really expect to...

Yes and no.

Yes they are a some apps in devel and testing useful (depends on what you want and what you use), but this apps are going to be on extras sooner or later.

No, because just in extras are a lot of apps and very useful for the end user (regular user, maybe and android/iphone user).

i'm an end user, and yes, sometimes is killing see an app that you have to wait a lot of time to got it in your device, but in the end most of them are coming.

I have to be clear on this, i don't have twitter or facebook or anything of that, but to my needs (not everyones needs) this is the most awesome device in the market.

Grettings.

lol must be the bad lighting

Well, I think it wouldn't be so bad at the mass market.
I found it may be desperating because of recurrent slow-downs when it does I/O, the mail app being too slow and limited, no portrait support and the relatively ease you can destroy your device if you do something you don't really know what does it do. But it could have been a "safer" device if Nokia would have hidden some things like Terminal as a "default" (maybe leting the possibility to have it back from phone settings or something like that).
It's really easy to install apps from maemo extras and testing, there are already warnings about extras-devel, you just need to get in TMO and go to "downloads", a shortcut to that would have been similar to a free app-store (besides ovi store), it adds the catalog easily, and you don't need to be a geek to click on the "install" button.
And PR updates are not any hard at all, at least as i found in my device, just when I bought it, it upgraded to PR1.2 just by confirming a "pop-up", it took 5 minutes while I didn't touch the phone. That doesn't require any hacking hability at all.

I think those who believe it is JUST a Developers phone are wrong. It just maybe won't be used at top by a normal user, and they might get disappointed about it lacking some basic features as phone (and that didn't really had a reason to be, that was real Nokia's fault), but as handheld it would have been also used propperly.

The "feeling" of the phone is nice, UI is really intuitive if you take in count "tap outside" closes dialogs and ITS NOT MULTITOUCH!
(I have found the IPhone, just like windows in desktop situation, has made people expect everything to be the way it is in iOS/Windows, even if it's not really better/necessary/right, it happens too when talking about difficulties users coming from windows find when using (K)Ubuntu, It's proven a 50yr lady who didn't knew anything of computers foun hardest to "use" Windows than Kubuntu)

Maybe the main drawback for N900 was it's cost. It was high, and with lacking basic features... But again, the reason for this was Nokia's intention for it not to be mass-market device. There are really no technical reasons for that, as it has been proven by the community.