In a completely unrelated company the Lenovo Intel tablets were a lot like this. They came out too early, Lenvo discounted the hell out of them (with Intel's help) to get them into people's hands, and then it took a year of Android on x86 updates to get them into something resembling a usable product.
I don't think it was very confidence building in the Lenovo tablet brand but I also don't think Google is very invested in the Pixel branding either. Its more a "yeah we have something like that too."
Had you told me that Surface would be driving feature / design decisions at Apple and Google a year ago I would have considered you ill informed :-) but here we are, Apple inventing using a pen type cover with your tablet and Google building "2 in 1" hardware.
It just reinforces my experience with how dynamic technology trends can be.
Remember that whole thing about "oh, I wonder when Google is going to kill this new service" after the Reader debacle? Yeah, it's like that.
With Apple it's the other way around. Because it has reinforced the idea that each new product they launch will sell in millions in the first month, now everyone expects Apple to sell millions of whatever new product they launch - even if they don't like it personally (such as the Apple Watch).
It's okay to experiment. For instance, maybe the Chromecast seems like genius idea in hindsight, but perhaps when they were first working on it they thought maybe it will succeed maybe it won't.
However, some products are just dumb - like a $300 Google TV, or a $300 device that only streams music from your phone, or the n-th attempt to take the phone/tablet Android interface and try to put it on a notebook-like device.
Google should've known better by now that that doesn't work, and not just because it failed with Android, but it also failed with Windows 8. I'm actually very much in favor of Android on PCs, but they need to actually optimize it for PCs because they push it like that.
See also: Microsoft's Kin phone that actually shipped and was discontinued 48 days later.
The dichotomy between (Android phones/tablets->Nexus->outside OEMs) and (CrOS laptops/tablet->Pixel->internal) is very odd though, and I wonder how confident the Pixel team is in their place at Google. Chrome OS is finding success, but the future still looks like it'll be Android.
As for the Pixel C specifically, the problems are all in the software--maybe rather than making another Nexus tablet for Android N, they'll build it for the Pixel C.
Kin looks like an example of this. The Kin team were mostly from the SideKick acquisition and they worked really hard on it. Kin had the social angle and it would have been interesting if it had sold to the target audience (teenagers). WP7 picked up on the social aspects in Kin and that was probably final blow to it as a product (before it even shippet). It was ahead of it's time and pitched at completely the wrong price point.
Whatever the convergence plan is, Pixel C is the test hardware. The bootloader bits are in the ChromeOS tree. It uses Coreboot.
It's a ChromeOS device and I suspect it's future will include a return to its roots.
ARC in Chrome will be a better way forward for Android than trying to fix all of Android's insidious problems on the "desktop" and making mobile Chrome more fully featured. It just seems painfully obvious that Chrome is going to win.
It's better tech all around.
[edit: insertspace]
That's how I use my MBA 11''. XMonad, mutt and friends.
But this one could be better.
From the standpoint of the whole company it doesn't make much sense.
From the standpoint of an individual manager responsible for the product and his CV, however...
Google (Alphabet?) mostly does "fail fast", where they are funding a plethora of products in a myriad of different fields. So it's not surprising that some products appear to be half-baked. So they threw this one out there. If it gets traction, then fine. If it doesn't, it will be terminated quite quickly.
This is a strategy adopted by many other companies. It's the antithesis of the oft quoted Steve Jobs philosophy:
“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I'm actually as proud of the things we haven't done as the things I have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.”
It raises the question: why did this ship at all? Why waste marketing dollars, muddle your overall branding/product lines (Nexus vs. Pixel), and compete with your own existing products (Nexus 9)?
Microsoft canceled the Surface Mini at the last minute, because it was clear that WinRT had no future. Once the touchscreen Chrome OS got canceled, the Pixel C should have been too.