I think the first commenter is right on the money - it's about control and striving to protect your existing business models with promises, hype and patents. I wonder if we could see free equipment that's pay per hour even (and plentiful advertisement).

That said, I do wonder about this current trend of ignoring latency in just about everything. Using gagdets seems more and more sluggish every year even if once running, lots of processing and action happens. Like using Twitter on a mobile browser is pure Hell and the original concept was pretty much just constrained writing as a social media.