It's so strange that the experience people have with the phone vary so wildly. Is there so much difference in build quality that the software suffers from it?
In all honesty, dragging the N900 into the discussion again is... not fair. Maemo itself was built as an OS specifically for internet tablets, not smartphones. I quite vividly remember that the quick-start of the N900 had the possibility of calling at the very last page, almost as an afterthought. That being said, Android supports hardware keyboards out of the box. They even have a page dedicated to it!