open source advocate @ Maemo Devices, Quim Gil stated the following update :

Please set your expectations right for next week: nothing beautiful, stable or fully featured wil be released for handsets next week. 99% of you don't want to install that release in your N900 and the rest probably have two devices or is used to reflash.

It's a first code dump release, nothing else. It is very important from a platform development point of view, mildly interesting for application developers (because of the architecture announced, mainly) and nothing the average user or blogger will be interested playing with.

Dual boot will come at some point, or at least it's in the plans. It's clearly convenient for developers. The elegant solution implies patching the current Maemo 5 kernel and it is too late for PR 1.2. Maybe less elegant solutions are available before, maybe the elegant solution comes soon... We don't know yet and currently we have other priorities. As said, not even for the average developer these first unstable releases are interesting enough to maintain a dual boot in their devices.