[ludoo]

Spot on. They should have found an existing model with good but not out of the ordinary specs (something like a 5" HD display, 2Gb RAM, etc.), appealing design, reasonably cheap (as in Nexus 4 cheap), and promised quick delivery. There's plenty of Chinese OEM or second-tier brands able to produce such phones here and now, and having owned a few most of them are good, sound devices hardware wise.

Then started working like mad on getting out a nice, user friendly, hackable OS to early adopters.

It's all in the OS, especially since nobody knows how the specs of the planned phone will compare to next year's models.

[fader]

Remember when Walmart started selling Linux PCs 6-7 years ago? They were the cheapest, lowest-end models you could buy. So people had the association between Linux and low-end/underpowered for quite a long time.

On the other hand, remember what phones were like before the iPhone? Creating something that blew away the current market worked well there.