Honeycomb originally started as a fork for tablets only. It looked like the plan was to have the 2.x branch for phones and the 3.x branch for tablets. I think recently something happened and they are now going to standardize on the 3.x branch for everything. This leaves google with its pants down as 3.x is barely ready for tablets, let alone for phones. So now they have quite a bit of work to do and don't want to give away the goods to smaller manufacturers (who will simply make shit phones and hurt the brand) just yet. I think these smaller partners can survive waiting a couple months for 3.0 while google puts in all this work to make it acceptable. Heck, its free expert level coding for them. I'd hate to see what Sylvania or A-Open or whomever would do with a half cooked 3.0 source.