I agree with most what you said but this one "Developing on Symbian directly is a royal pain in the backside". Developing for Symbian directly was and is pain -

I agree with most what you said but this one "Developing on Symbian directly is a royal pain in the backside". Developing for Symbian directly was and is pain - actually I have spend only couple of months trying to learn that (with some degree of success) and I have not liked that too much. Later Nokia pushed message "use Qt for everything, now Qt is everything" (or at least I got it this way). That's the point there you are wrong. Developing for Symbian using Qt is not very hard. There are still some cases where you must use workarounds or think about specifics (like touch and non-touch Nokia phones are different), but overall experience is great. The only remaining question for Nokia is "isn't it too late?".