That being said, this is a perfect example of how Google entirely screwed up with this. This would have been the ultimate keynote release to Google IO. Not saying that it won't still be, but now other competitors have a great idea to build off of. Google should have just been quiet until this product was at least to a manufacturing stage.
A world where people hack together cool things using Google tech, or hack together cool things a bit like Google tech, or hack together cool things better than Google tech.
In the case of something that has a developer culture around it (say, a chumby or something) you have a higher number of developers ready to go 'at the start' since they've had time to think about killer apps.
One could point at how early-stage multiplayer videogames are developed for a good counterexample.