I wonder why I have such a better feeling about the OpenMoko than the Nokia n800.
I feel that I know the OpenMoko already just by reading Harald's blog and browsing its wiki. It's a pretty stock arm system, boots with uboot, system in jffs2 flash, interesting interface to the necessarily proprietary cell phone stuff, all the hardware will work with only lightly modified linux kernels and the kdrive X server. Major downside of no wifi, though bluetooth is available, and if there's power, a USB wifi dongle could be used.
Afrer putting in a similar amount of time googling for info about the n800, I'm still left in the dark on a number of points. I don't know what the boot loader is, what kernel or X modifications are needed, whether non-free drivers might be needed for some hardware, etc. IIRC the n700 had some issues along those lines.
Of course, the reason I care about this stuff is that I can't conceive of owning a linux PDA or cell phone and not putting Debian on it, and I don't mean running Debian in a chroot, which is as far as I've heard of people getting with either the n800 or the n700. The GUI stuff for both these is pretty nice, and would make nice Debian packages. I, however, want to use ion.
Note: See discussion for some notes based on feedback.