Have you considered the N900. That would be an easy way to blow $600. It's the only phone that tempts me right now, other than the N86.
The N97 to me seems pointless. S60 5th edition is the lamest of all the touch interfaces. It's obviously a desparate hold over to keep customers and not look completely irrelevant, while Nokia gets Maemo going.
On the other hand, I have to hand it to Nokia. For being the last ones to the table with a serious touch driven device, they've come up with what seems like it will be the best platform. Since Maemo is just Debian Linux and competely open, the N900 will be the first phone that can truly claim to be a phone that is a computer in the desktop computer sense. Of course WebOS and Android are Linux underneath, and even the iPhone is ultimately based on a version of Unix. But they're crippled and controlled in proprietary ways and have to be jail broken and all that kind of crap. Maemo's just going to be an OS like any other that you can do what you want with it. Run real Firefox, OpenOffice, thousands of different Linux applications. I think Maemo is going to be a true water shed platform.
And it will likely put the iPhone to shame (I know, famous last words). The only reason I can explain there not being more buzz currently around the N900 is because it's too much of a paradigm shift for people to really understand. Either that, or the dumbed down, crippled, "we'll make the decisions for you" type devices are what most people actually want.
Still, I like the N86 as the last greatest S60 device. And since I don't have an N82, the camera on the N86 is pretty tempting. But the N900 is just around the corner. The only downside may be that as the first Maemo phone it could be buggy. But I read one reviewer with a pre-production N900 has been trying as hard as he can to get it to crash and has not been able to. That's not surprising, I suppose, with Debian as the underlying system. Anyway, I would not for one second consider the N97 over the N900. That's like choosing a S60/Touch monstrosity that was never meant to be, over the future.