The product is fantastic. They knew that already and I'm quite sure that their sales projections would have at least contemplated the positive reception. But d

The product is fantastic. They knew that already and I'm quite sure that their sales projections would have at least contemplated the positive reception. But doing hardware right in mass scale takes time, money, and domain knowledge. Google is not a hardware manufacturer and it's not their core competency. Neither is it handing off specs to manufacturers to make anything other than relatively small production runs (for the scale of the mobile business). Hardware needs support, sales channels, advertising, industry knowledge and logistics, and the possibility of screwing up does not diminish with scale (look at how Apple, even manufacturing one new model at a time, still has had plenty of bugs in iOS and the physical iPhones themselves). Android is already doing fanastically well; it's logical for them to be conservative about this release.