endsormeans,
I agree Maemo5 is a great UI for phones and tablets, I sometimes even VNC my N900 screen onto my LineageOS tablet.
I would probably keep Gnome-flashback on my laptop though.
How hard would it be to hack curent KDE into a Maemo flavored touch UI fork? Throw that onto ARM Debian and you would only rarely notice the difference from full Maemo5.