I think you're over-thinking this. It's clear to me that Honeycomb simply isn't done. You can see it on the xoom. It's just not ready yet. It was shipped incredibly early.
Google is holding it back because their probably just not happy with the state the thing is in. It was rushed and this is their implicit omission of it.I think this is a pride of ownership thing, nothing more.
My simple question to you is: why do you think that?
Shipping a mobile operating system is an impossibly complex task, but surely you can understand a parallel with a simple application: just because you wrote an app that's being successful doesn't mean you're ready to open source it the same day you release it. Maybe you want to clean it up, or refactor it, or make it easier to be reused by the open source community.
It's a little more nuanced than that. They believed the binaries were a good product for 10-inch tablets, but would perform badly on smaller screens. If they ship source, though, people will try to get it running on small screens.
That's what the Ars article is referring to as cutting corners (an inflammatory statement): Honeycomb could have been generic enough to be a good product on all screen sizes, but they needed to save time to let the Xoom meet its ship date.
I'm arguing that Google didn't even believe that the binaries were a good product for 10-inch tablets. My bet is that Motorola forced their hand a bit, as opposed to waiting for the software to actually be complete.
It's a pretty long list of issues with the XOOM software even today.
I agree, which raises the question of whether they should have shipped Honeycomb in its current state at all. It really looks like they decided that the Xoom had to ship before the iPad 2 regardless of the quality of its software, and that seems to have backfired.
Google is holding it back because their probably just not happy with the state the thing is in. It was rushed and this is their implicit omission of it.I think this is a pride of ownership thing, nothing more.