UI responsiveness and polish is a lot better than what I would have expected. Pinephone and mobile Linux are coming a long way!
Typing in a passcode: dots are too small, not spaced out enough
Keyboard: it feels like the characters are about to run into the borders
Camera: lots of just empty black space around the picture--I'd rather they just overscan it a bit to fill up the entire screen.
Lack of a splash screen, icons in the app drawer are a bit too large, many of the prompts obviously expecting a mouse input, screens where responsiveness to the screen form factor is just broken.
I am overall impressed with how far Linux on a phone has come--it's also still a long way to the top.
On most OSes when you press your mouse or finger on an interactive element, that element highlights in some manner (e.g. text color changes, ripple appears, background color changes).
That's critical for proper feedback and feel of a UI. It's almost entirely missing in that demo video.
Battery life is also a shambles; I thought about using my Pinephone at least as a music player, streaming the music to my Bluetooth headphone amp, but it often happens that playing a single album with the screen off completely depletes the battery.
Your experience sounds more like what I would have expected at this stage - we'll get there though!
Now if they can get that app scaling dialed in a bit more, then I can see myself using Fedora (I currently use mobile.danctnix.org, BTW).
What I did notice is that gnome isn't dialed into phones (so to speak). For example I tried setting the date/time and you have to press +/- on the hour and minute to get to the time you want. The popup for month had a long list of months, but it put jan-mar off the top of the screen.
Maybe megous has a better idea, but I believe bt requires keeping the wifi radio powered as well? Is there something that could be done at the driver level to separate the power domains?
Maybe using mpd and disabling the UI when you don't need it will help. Most of the gnome players use gstreamer and trigger constant events in their UI.
Note that Maemo is a decade-old codebase that has bitrotted, so running it on the PinePhone isn't a reasonable solution.
BTW, if you miss Maemo, try Maemo Leste (https://leste.maemo.org, if you want to get a glimpse before trying see https://linmob.net/videos/#maemo-leste).