MeeGo to Become Default OS for Nokia Smartphones?

To my complete surprise, I found an article on Slashdot this morning, in which Reuters was quoted as saying that Nokia is going to ditch Symbian on the N series of phones. Instead of the trusted in-house OS, Nokia is moving their flagship product to MeeGo.

For those of you who don't know, MeeGo is the merger or Nokia's very on Maemo project and Intel's Moblin. All three projects have the same aim: to provide a full Linux distribution for mobile devices. Nokia's main aim is the smartphone market, while Intel started out thinking about MIDs and netbooks.

The move on Nokia's part is quite unexpected, since they just recently reiterated that Symbian would always be at the core of their smartphone offering. Symbian is great, don't get me wrong, but I wouldn't want to develop for it. It's getting old in the tooth and requires a lot of work to get used to.

Now, what does that mean in the mobile landscape? Why would Nokia move in this direction? What does that all mean in context?