I would love for them to start with Microsoft Surface (with keyboard as standard in some models it would kinda be the logical choice) but I understand that Nexus is a) earlier b) cheaper c) you have to start with something.
Right?
The reason for the Nexus 7 focus is simple. It is, by far, the most popular while being very powerful tablet with market penetration.
I still think Canonical has this misguided idea that average Joe will go through the process of unlocking their Nexus 7 to install Ubuntu, but it has a reasoning behind it.
I would much rather see Ubuntu on my Transformer Infinity, since it has hdmi out and a keyboard dock. I could easily plug it into a monitor and have a desktop like experience that way.
I've loaded up Ubuntu on my original Transformer.
Granted, it has a Tegra 2 CPU, which to put it mildly is not very powerful, but Nvidia has put out the required source and modules to put up a Linux distro which takes advantage of it.
Maybe Ubuntu just has gotten "bloated" over the years and everyone has failed to notice because all PCs are overpowered these days, but when I booted it up on the Transformer, a machine which runs Android flawlessly, smoothly and responsive, I was severely disappointed.
Everything. Was. Dead. Dead. Slow. Prepare to wait multiple, multiple seconds to open that terminal. And please don't talk aobut browser-performance. Ouch.
Maybe it will run better on the newer models, but trying it out in real life was a little off-putting. On the other side: If Canonical is putting in effort to get it running well on the Nexus 7, it should translate to an overall performance-improvement across the line.
And that would be welcomed very much.
When my terminal after starting unity is pid 12000, you can guess bloat has occured. Even on my arch boot my terminal after auto login through the x virtual console is pid ~500 still.
Also, Unity uses at least 300Mb of memory, and composting. Compostinggggg.
Most of the inefficiencies in a modern Arch distro, for example, are build around plug and play mostly I think. Udev, systemd, dhcp, etc are all designed to gently allow arbitrary hardware arrangements without interrupting the experience, but cost performance to determine what is available and constantly babysit the environment.