Fundamentally its still a good product, but its their finished hardware that was lacking and the price that it was sold at is still way too high for what it is. If they priced it at $599 for a dev kit it would have been the next big thing. The other issue is that every snapdragon x elite product that was launched was flawed in one way or another. WHile the performance & battery life was there the actual devices that launched that day were all extremely mid to say the least. It felt more like the companies that they collabed w/ (Asus, Acer, Samsung, Dell, Lenovo) all just half committed and made a product that was way too conservative for the launch. The only Snapdragon product that was actually decent was the surface pro which ended up not even being ready for the launch date.

No marketing BS translation of the notice:

"We Qualcomm as a pure patent troll realized that a dev-kit running linux could allow the community to build open source drivers and create, GOD FORBIDS, an open system used in ways that is not completely controlled and milked by us."