Actually, they do. You've done a lot of explaining for them, but the fact that you did so implies that the need. What you say may be true (and it certainly sounds reasonable) but I personally haven't seen this kind of messaging from Google, and I bought my N1 directly from them.
Indeed, I'm rather curious to know what the primary source is for your information. Perhaps there is an Android or a Nexus One blog I should be subscribed to.
More generally, I wouldn't expect any company to do a point-by-point deconstruction of a product (past or present) the way I did. It is unreasonable to expect a company to trash something that plenty of employees worked on and plenty of customers were happy with. But I expect these sorts of issues were the subtext of Google/HTC saying that the Nexus One was "too old" for ICS.
When I EOL my N1 I'll again start paying attention religiously to phandroid, androidandme, and bgr to find Google's next golden child.
No, they really don't. Google has been clear that, in their opinion, the Nexus One hardware doesn't support ICS. And while we all know someone will shoehorn a version of ICS on there somehow (after all, someone did it for the G1), there's plenty of evidence that Google's opinion is reasonable:
- the limited internal storage (512 MB) [ICS distributions are substantially bigger than Gingerbread ones and there were plenty of Nexus One users pinched for space on Gingerbread]
- the relatively weak GPU [less ability to support and probably less benefit from the new rendering architecture]
- no front-facing camera [i.e. no Face Unlock]
- no NFC [i.e. no Android Beam]
- ...
Feel free to complain that Google and HTC made bad choices when designing the Nexus One, if you want. In retrospect, they clearly did. But it isn't at all hard to explain why the Nexus One isn't getting ICS.