But why do this instead of just ordering a Pyra? I think it actually will ship in a few months. Why fragment our already lamentably small community into numerous sub projects, no one of which has enough supporters?

So many people say "Oh, it's gotta have a resistive screen" or "no hardware keyboard is a deal-breaker for me". We will be very very lucky to get any machine that is a true successor to our beloved N900s (which are all slowly dying - no mobile phones are designed to last 7+ years). We can't afford to be picky, or to fragment our tiny group with a lot of under supported projects. I saw that happen with the Openmoko software; there were half a dozen different stacks produced, none of which had enough developers.