LG bought parts of webOS from HP[0] in 2013 and showcased a smart TV running on webOS[1] at CES this year[2]. HP continues to be involved in the development of Enyo[3].
I know they're trying to continue, but neither HP nor Palm when they owned the brand did anything amazing with it. Palm pre was really cool and WebOS on Touchpad was great to use... it just really missed useful apps. I get a feeling that if they invested in getting even a 100 of good apps either written for or ported to WebOS at the time of the first tablet, it could turn out completely differently...
So, coming back to the point of contrast with Firefox OS, one has to acknowledge that Mozilla is pushing Firefox OS very hard. There is a dedicated app store which has more than a thousand apps now. Mozilla also has a passionate community behind it.
Yeah it seems like it was a great platform, and was just held back by the companies that owned it. I'd still like to see it be picked up again, even if it's not by Mozilla for the reasons that fabrice_d pointed out. I remember it looking really slick, and running incredibly smooth, even on the hardware that was available 5 years ago.