Companies should do what they say they're going to do, but these dev kits are an example of something that's relevant to HN but not to Qualcomm's business.
Windows ARM -- still borked in SOOO many ways -- and its 10+ years old now.
Internally, nearly 20 years. It was kept alive for a long time by a single individual as a side project. When I first got out of college I actually helped update tests that were being used for it (I maintained the ARM compiler test harness, and it was being used for some Windows on ARM stuff as well).
Microsoft has never went fully in on arm, whereas Apple was willing to burn bridges and start brand new.
For individual devs laptops are fine, usually, but there's also no solid "reference" platform, since all the laptops are targeting different consumer lines.
That's a bit beside the point though, the Dev kits should've come out months before the consumer products were launched... and failing that at the same time.
Qualcomm and Arrow said the units would ship "tomorrow" in July... and it took over a month (after accepting many orders) before they even updated the stock to a more realistic timeframe, late September.