My guess is a bunch of embedded Linux hackers and a large patent portfolio, which relative other vendors they're quite short on. Maybe webOS would be recycled as an OS for the ePaper products or something, but I wouldn't bet on its future even if it does go over to Amazon.
Even so it's a hard deal for me to get my head around. Amazon is not an acquisition-happy company. There's usually very clear alignment and they've never done a big talent acquisition, so I suspect there'd have to be something very specific that they're after.
What if their plan is to buy the right to ship software updates to the million TouchPad owners?
On the simple end, they could port Kindle, MP3, Prime Video, etc., and make them available as part of of a firmware update.
If they really want to, though, they could even make an "official" upgrade to Amazon's fork of Android, with the Appstore and UI that the Fire has (more precisely, the one from the 10" Fire variant they're working on).
So that gets them: (1) patents they need, (2) a bunch of in-house expertise in the full tablet hardware and software stack, (3) a bunch of customers to sell their content to and convert to their ecosystem.
That pretty much puts every asset Palm has to use except for WebOS itself, and as someone posted earlier, even that might be useful as a hedge against Google's handling of Android.
patents seem the big thing to me. If they are not cross licensing with microsoft/apple already they will probably get sued very soon, the Palm IP would be quite a big shield.
Even so it's a hard deal for me to get my head around. Amazon is not an acquisition-happy company. There's usually very clear alignment and they've never done a big talent acquisition, so I suspect there'd have to be something very specific that they're after.