[Noir]

But see..this is the oversight on M$ part..when your building an OS that will come out in the future..you have to fight the enemies of tomorrow..not the enemies of today...even Palm released WebOS which at the time was on hardware on par with the times..M$ on the other-hand planned to release in end of 2010/early 2011 and did not take this into account? complete oversight...

Can't get blood from a lemon though. The dual core/optimized snapdragon processors were only pipe dreams in early/mid 2009. Heck snapdragon wasn't "fully" released till that fall with the HD2 and TG01 and both of those devices were not optimized for snapdragon. They were underclocked actually and clocked based on demand. Now we can argue all day here whether microsoft could grab tech from thin air and create binaries based on that, but then...let's think a moment.
Prolong a release to try and gain any marketshare or wait and lose even more marketshare. Dollars and cents answer would be to grab the tech available and ensure the code base is there for future updating. Heck, every smartphone manufacturer does this...save from sony and the whole x10 snaffoo, but even now sony is creating a phone based on gingerbread. Bravo for once sony!

The dual cores were available for purchase already this year..the newer 2nd gen snapdragons were available last year..they just cost more..manufacturers though choose to buy whatever gives them competitive performance for cheapest price to widen their profit margins...To be fair unlike Android M$ requires the hardware to be certified and optimized for before implementing it..so a dual core may be pushing it..BUT they really have no excuse for not releasing a 2nd gen 1ghz snapdragon similar to the one in the mytouch 4g..the processor as been out for over a year..and there really is no excuse..

Now I concede that point. It is very true that microsoft could've got the second gen snapdragon single core. But then I have to wonder about cost...and in that alienation of OEMs that are hanging on microsoft by a thin thread. I think the old snapdragon route was a good one imho and surprisingly is performing quite well especially with regard to gaming and ui experience. I'll get to the mt4g soon though.

It wasn't silly..people were looking at HTC Gold..and since HD2 came out over a year ago who would expect M$ to go with more of the same?

Slowly raises hand. We all knew the hd2 was the prototype device for wp7 as well as the TG01. Could've seen as far as the sun is yellow that microsoft was going with snapdragon based devices. HTC HD2 shined when it became the proverbial hit as well a capacitive monster that makes tech boys have dreams about...
I contend anyone thinking microsoft was using more than snapdragon ESPECIALLY after CES 2010 is insane and has not paid attention to microsoft one iota.

People thought M$ would work with hardware providers to ensure that they were ahead of the curve

I'm pretty sure they did work with smartphone developers (not carriers sadly). I think in order to make modifications for the core, they had honestly no choice but to ensure the hardware companies matched all specifications to make a unified product.

CE7? you mean CE6...

No I mean CE7
Windows Phone 7 is based on Win CE 7
CE6 or CE7? [Archive] - xda-developers
trust if it was ce 6.0, a port of wp7 (even early beta on hd2) wouldn't be possible. Ask cotulla sometime, pretty insightful stuff. Or Da_G who always said CE7 from day one
Regardless CE7 has a lot of nice goodies that has support for a lot of nice things. I MEAN A LOT OF NICE THINGS...like really REALLY NICE THINGS for mobile and tablet platforms

Carriers still control updates :/

Carriers (TMO e.g) or OEMS (like samsung)? The latter I can see in some ways after looking at the new wp7 samsung update bringing in some stability to camera and other hw that is sorta needed (battery tweaks please!!!) but carriers...not too sure...
It's tough to say how microsoft will do this honestly but I always thought it was using an apple paradigm we download install backup done

as for Qualcomm..they have good processors..the problem is either they price them too high, have too much licensing on every little tech(HTC drivers anyone?)..or manufacturers are being too cheap and trying to cut corners or up their profit margins

Oh god don't get me started on HTC! I mean the best part of wp7 means that HTC can't cut corners and release the hot dog parts of phones and call them new. 3 gens of mytouch (save from the mt4g) have all been hot dogs of crap parts that HTC couldn't sell and rebrand as a new phone and try and milk cash from people. That's been HTC for a while. I won't lie (touch pro v tp2 anyone)

Samsung on the other hand produces their own processors and other hardware so they dont have to pay the middleman fees and put it in their devices cost effectively..

I'll say again I've always liked samsung processors and devices. But htc has the hackability. So that meant if I want to go REALLY low in kernel I have to use htc. And because the current dev tools barely support samsung (lg and dell still has zero support), the hands are tied =(