Personally, I care to know a bit about what I'm speeding my money on. Someone shopping for a tablet might want to know it's an ASUS tablet. Google is a reseller. This isn't a Google tablet any more than any other ASUS tablet is "by Google." If anyone doesn't care about that, I suppose that's fine for them too.

Google have been acquiring companies at a steady rate for years. They have enough people in house right now to do all this stuff on their own. I've already mentioned SageTV. This is the stuff I want to see. Every time I hear about a new "Google Product" I never actually see a Google product at all.

The orb thing looks like it's finally in this space, but it's also destined for the dustbin. An opinion which I'm surprised is starting to be echoed by a lot of others as well, even long-time Google fans.