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.

(They does not deny it outright though. That's little devilish (evilish not a word!), but I can sympathy with them)