Yes, this is perfectly reasonable.

However i'd like to add a detail:

If I plug in the Nokia headphones and then execute a dmesg, I can see:

headphone (GPIO 177) is now connected.

So the kernel does recognize them as headphones. Since i'm new to the maemo platform is there some other diagnostic I can do?

Ok, I have another news...
I really can't figure out why, but it seems that Nokia headphones doesn't work so well on iPhone or other devices, too. I hear a somewhat distant sound. So... maybe we have a winner?