[Note: these are my thoughts and not those of my former employer. I had zero visibility into a potential Palm acquisition and was as surprised as everyone else on Wednesday when I read the news]
As the case with most of the large tech companies, there is a lot of Apple jealousy inside the halls of the product side of the HP house. I used to play a game of reverse Buzzword Bingo, collecting one point for every meeting during a given week when Apple wasn't mentioned in some capacity ("we need to be as elegant/integrated/creative as the iPhone... we want this to be the iPhone of X"). Most weeks my score was 0— 1 on the weeks when I had meetings with the facility manager.
From that perspective, buying Palm makes a ton of sense for the world's largest tech supermarket: it gets the chance to bring a line of products to market that are fully integrated, it controls the software experience, and from what I've been told (because I've never owned a webOS device myself), it gets a very good copy of the iPhone OS which can be ported with little effort up and down the product line.
This is why it makes sense that the company would cancel the slate rumor that was rushed to announcement in January and I suspect that it will also be just a matter of time before all of the released Android products— and worse still— any of the on-deck Android products— get canceled or replaced by ones with webOS in their plan of record.
In fact, the fate of Android inside of HP is likely the greatest casualty of this whole deal, and given the recent pressure exerted on HTC by Apple's lawyers, it doesn't come at a good time. While it it hardly the case that HP was single handedly moving Android forward with its engagement with the OS, I think as one of 3 "tier one" players who had begun to embrace it (albeit apprehensively) with partners and the supply chain, the signaling power of the company's retreat will be felt.
It was never easy for HP to get its head around Android— between the open development model and Google's inconsistent messaging around Android versus Chrome and the different classes of devices (which seemed at times poorly thought out and at times just downright flakey), it was a bumpy takeoff every step of the way. HP is a company used to dealing with "vendors" who meet RFPs and charge license/support costs to deliver predictable help, not a community guided by a single company whose core business wasn't serving HP's needs.
In the end, I'm not sure whether HP can make webOS a commercial success (it may be too late), but I applaud their boldness in trying it. There is a lot a stake here if the world continues to go the route of app stores and platform dictators and I'd hate to play without full control of the stack (not to mention the glee at HP legal on the patent trove they're about to own).
What I do think is true is that we consumers ought to fast forward and think through whether we'll be better served with Apple, Google, RIM, and now HP all running this same playbook, or with the seemingly fading promise of a post-PC world that is as open as the desktop/browser one has been for the last decade.