Is the Nexus One very similar to the HTC Hero as offered by Sprint? If so, wouldn't the Hero be as good a platform?

I feel the vendors create such a cloud (or smoke and mirrors) that I cannot really figure out what is what.

We have the Sprint Hero phones and they work largely fine and many applications are OK. So far none of them got me excited out of the about 100 apps I tried. Many were sent into history within two minutes. As I have no clue who can see my data I do not even like the idea of banking with the phone.

So here we have a (probably) good phone but a murky infrastructure on weak legs. Why would I want to use the phone for business applications rather than a netbook? Yes, a netbook is pain with the boot time but I have my data somewhat safe.