> It's honestly very difficult to imagine how a small group, no matter how talented and driven, can possibly succeed where open source giants Canonical and Mozilla couldn't.

For one thing, it looks like they are leaving much of the development up to the wider community. Gnome/Plasma will handle the UI for instance. Mozilla and Canonical tried to experiment to much with the interface and build too much of it from scratch. Even MS was to "innovative", the had all the parts in place to build a better android but they wanted to put tiles in.