i'm definitely buying another if i can in the 2nd round. I can't say enough about webOS. It does a lot of stuff right and in a lot of ways its got the best of both the iOS (clean, polished, consistent, not fragmented) and Android (customizable, notifications, flash) worlds and it has the absolute best multitasking, notification system, and native facebook app on any tablet anywhere. Its crazy easy to "root" and also synergy is great. I really think the reason this device wasn't a hit right out of the gate is because nobody knew wtf webOS was AND nobody was spending $500 on a tablet that wasn't an ipad. The ebay market has shown that the pricepoint for this is around $250 and thats with people worried about support ending. $275 would have worked well to gain marketshare and even if it that was ultimately first round break even, there is always app revenue.
Biggest shortcoming is number of apps, but hopefully with hp selling like 1 million of these things devs will keep going. Most of the ones that do exist are pretty good.
Thinking about this more, if amazon builds their tablet (with all of their vertical integration that they have), they really should build it on webos over android and sell it for sub $300. It could be an insanely awesome and profitable (with amazon purchases) device. Amazon is the ONLYcompany that can compete with Apple on vertical integration and ultimately lifetime roi. But they can only do that if they can kill apple on price and if their tablet ends up north of $300, thats not happening.
Also jumptap says that webos advertising is making more money than android advertising on tablets right now. Pretty interesting considering there is exactly one webos tablet and its been out for less than 1 quarter.