After reading (and attempting to quickly implement the models ensembles within) both the RealFill[0] and Break-A-Scene[1] papers published from Google researchers just prior to the Pixel 8 launch I was expecting either a leap in their G3 tensor core akin to 2013 Moto X NLP+contextual awareness cores[2] (which provided better implementations of Active Display, gesture recognition, and voice recognition in loud environs than 95% of current mobile devices) or the Coral[3], the edge TPU they developed that got shockingly amazing inference performance from (though HW production handed off to ASUS in 2022--thanks to the chip shortage, the general arbitrary nature of the company, and their wholesale divestment from IoT) I expected more.
All that to say this: your assumptions of inference performance on >$1000 hardware are fundamentally flawed (the fact that you reach for the buzzy "generative" prefix suggests they're erroneously informed by twitter influencers and attempting to deploy current LLMs.)
Custom hardware can and has been developed in the past (on mobile devices) that could've been tailored to the task at hand. If they failed to meet performance, power draw, or processing time requirements, they should've reframed their pitch instead of exposing themselves to what is likely going to be yet another class action suit focusing on their hardware.
[0] https://realfill.github.io/ [1] https://omriavrahami.com/break-a-scene/static/paper/Break-A-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moto_X_(1st_generation)#Hardwa... [3] https://coral.ai/