Well it looks like they have already done something better than all their non-Apple competitors - instead of rushing it out half finished they seem to have waited until it's done. Given the biggest complaint about webos on the phone was the power of the processor this stands a good chance of being a nice product. fingers crossed for them
(I'm unlikely to give up my iPad given iCloud now but there really should be a decent competitor in the market place)
((and by decent I mean something a casual purchaser will be happy with and not a tablet that is good enough to make someone happy who pointedly doesn't want to buy Apple and will put up with all sorts))
The 500MHz processor in the original Pre really does hold back WebOS. Running an overclocked custom kernel, I have mine set at 1GHz, makes a huge difference to the usability and surprisingly doesn't reduce battery life by much (which is partly due to the custom kernels clocking the CPU back to 500MHz when the screen is off).
It looks like HP/Palm have learned from this and aren't going to make the same mistake twice, the more recent videos of the Touchpad show how much they've optimised the UI to remove the lag:
http://www.precentral.net/webos-3-0-optimizations-make-smoot...
As I was completely unaware of overclocking in WebOS and specifically for the original Pre (which I have), I'll save the user the bit of googling I did to find overclocking. I had no idea it was this easy in preware:
That's about the most positive spin I think you can put on being horribly late to market. But do you have evidence that they actually "waited until it was done" and didn't just rush to market also, just later because they started even further behind?
(I'm unlikely to give up my iPad given iCloud now but there really should be a decent competitor in the market place) ((and by decent I mean something a casual purchaser will be happy with and not a tablet that is good enough to make someone happy who pointedly doesn't want to buy Apple and will put up with all sorts))