You know Palm (or was it Access?) bought Be (and BeOS) for reasons then (and, to be fair, now too) unfathomable.
Now they can say "That's what we intended all along" ;-)
WebOS's biggest problem was UI performance. Sick, sad irony strikes again.
Given that mobile hardware is about where desktop hardware was when BeOS was invented, I wonder if some company could use it as a new smartphone OS. There's an unfinished ARM port in progress but would probably need commercial support to complete.
The thing about innovation is, it's not always possible to predict what will be valuable or not. Not many people would have predicted Linux back in Linus's early days, for example.