FTA: "It's actually a hybrid that is largely built on Harmattan, the legacy Maemo 6 code base that Nokia shuttered when it committed to MeeGo. It seems sort of dubious on the surface to call the software MeeGo when it's really still Maemo, but the hybrid is apparently designed in such a way that it has full API compatibility with MeeGo 1.2."

Yes, the UI is propriatery skin (that's not intended to get open sourced) over the open source internals. That's how the previous Maemo-based devices worked, too.

This is somewhat analogous to Android (which is open source) and HTC's Sense UI on top of it (which is specific to HTC). Google's Android pages don't neccessarily link to HTC' products.

That explains everything, but what with no releases since October 2010. That release was pretty bare bones as I recall, have they really made this much progress since then (and in the middle of layoffs/turmoil)?

The very first thing I see on meego.com is "MeeGo 1.2 Release ... 19 May, 2011".

EDIT: I realized you were probably talking not about the MeeGo platform but about the reference handset user interface. I don't know who has been developing that. Nokia announced their intention to differentiate with their own proprietary UX a while back as I recall. The only project I've heard of that uses the reference handset UX is the Community Edition of MeeGo for the Nokia N900.