[stewartbutler]

I don't think they intended to release explorer edition for consumer use at all; however, when the news hit and everyone was trying to get their hands on one they ended up trying to pivot a beta development platform into a consumer product and failed. Seems to me they have simply rolled back to their initial release plan.

It is also worth noting that Google is known to sink money into projects where the main payoff is data for another project; see Google 411, which was used as training data for their voice recognition.