Re: Won't matter...
That was not what happened. Nokia offered N9 to all operators - many said they didn't want it, some took a punt (I saw it for sale in the Czech republic, for instance, and it was sold in Australia on contract), but this was not Nokia's decision.
If you consider the project duration for a mobile device is about 18 months, the decision to take N9 or not would have been made BEFORE the famous Burning Platform memo, and before the decision to adopt Windows Phone. My feeling is that the main factor in Nokia moving to WindowsPhone was this failure to drum up interest in the MeeGo phone line.
N9 was a good product, and ahead of the competition in usability, but I think the operators had just lost patience with Nokia by then: return rates for N8 were very high, as customers couldn't get to grips with software that just was not finished (I have an N8, and like it, but the software wasn't "good enough" until Symbian Belle in 2012). "N9" was supposed to have been out in late 2010 on the hardware that became the N950, but the software never materialised, so the launch was cancelled. Here's an ad for that phone: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdSx_T3Em_g (note the branding is pre-2011; in 2011 Nokia changed their corporate branding to use their new "Pure" typeface, and also note that the phone is still advertised as "NSeries"- N8 was the last phone to be launched under this name).
By the way, the Lumia 800 was not the same hardware, just the same form factor. N9 was a TI OMAP system-on-chip, where Lumia was a Qualcomm Snapdragon.