Google doesn't stand to lose much of anything. The other tablet manufacturers have released very few solid tablet products, and mostly at prices that put them at a disadvantage to the iPad. If Google can put out their own tablet with good build quality, decent specs, and reliable software updates for more than a month (I'm looking at you, every other Android device), then they're improving the image of the OS itself as well as giving consumers a better tablet to buy.

What do the other manufacturers have to offer to the ecosystem? A few things, like the Transformer Prime, have been genuinely innovative devices, but it seems like they mostly just dump their own UIs on top of old versions of Android and act like that differentiates their products.

This is what bothers me the most: why don't hardware manufacturers focus on what they are good at- making beautiful hardware? They put one leg in hardware and another leg in software and then wonder why they're stumbling