I think that's a bit unfair. Meego was scheduled to use Wayland instead of X. While I don't remember if it did, Sailfish definitely does. Maemo was also quite of an early adopter of Pulseaudio. Thus, the whole Maemo-Meego-Sailfish saga has been one of the pioneers in changing the stack SysV/X/ALSA -> Systemd/Wayland/Pulseaudio and friends.

The N9 was a really polished product. Offline navigation was incredibly good. I still use it. With a bit of care it could have been a nice product.

Pretty much this. Lack of interest/willingness to invest aggressively from the CEO, even though Maemo looked quite promising when announced.

Meego was a distraction and pretty much a mistake. I think it was mainly pushed by Intel so they have a reason to sell Atom. People may not remember but before "netbooks" Atom was supposed to go into Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), which were much smaller than netbooks but larger than smartphones.

Netbooks pretty much came out as a "trial and error" device from PC manufacturers, who were failing with MIDs. If I remember right, Microsoft also had to extend selling new XP licenses post-Windows 7 launch, because of the netbook popularity, and because it didn't want Linux to become popular on them.