Today is a good day to revisit this, in light of the BusinessWeek piece about Android's "openness" myth fading…

If RIM hadn't made this move, would Android fragmentation alone been enough for Google to play their hand?

Yeup. The danger of being just a carrier for other platforms is exactly why RIM should have a clear message about the long-term focus on QNX and the benefits to developers of PlayBook-native deployment.

Balsillie seems to be gesturing in that direction ("You’re just not going to get things like gaming and multimedia, you’re not going to get the speed going through a VM interface."). Unfortunately he, and RIM by extension, suffers from an almost Balmerian inability to articulate a clear point of view.

7) Apple's in the US, RIM is in Canada.
8) "Steve" is two letters longer than "Jim"
…
100) the iPad is a better product

None of that is the point. The PlayBook is a new platform, and it is a sensible strategy to provide a migration strategy from a successful platform to help establish the new one. If Balsillie had the courage to say outright "our platform is better than Android, but until it is mature we want our customers to benefit from the app tonnage today" we wouldn't be having this fun picking apart his PR-speak.

The real story is that Android's openness enables competing platforms to use this strategy. Only Apple could leverage the iPhone ecosystem to bootstrap a tablet, but anyone can leverage the Android ecosystem to do the same.

I'm glad someone's brought up the analog of iPad's "emulation" of iPhone apps. If RIM would state clearly that they consider the native SDK the way forward and frame Android (and Flash, for that matter) as a legacy transition mechanism, I might even admire the approach.