Oddly, with a lot of the design decisions of Gnome-Shell, it is very similar to Maemo 5 (as opposed to the more dumbed down 'phoneOS' that Harmattan Maemo 6 is (don't get me wrong, I love my N9, but I loved the setup of Maemo 5 better)).

So my thoughts would be to get a very small N900 or N950 style form factor and just put full blown Debian Wheezy on it, with perhaps Gnome 3.8 (it seems to have most (if not all) of the 'Gnome' applications updated to match with the new style of having the main menu next to the Activities button.

For anyone who hasn't used Gnome-Shell, but has used the N900, I highly recommend it.

If I could get my N900 working with Gnome-Shell and pure Debian Wheezy, i'd be a dream come true!

slaapliedje