Death and times of WebOS and is there an afterlife for the HP Touchpad

I was once an early adopter, but only once. IT was two years ago and I bought my first data phone and it was a palm pre. It had everything that the iphone had except broad adoption. Hell I stil think it's a great device but now HP is basically giving the ecosystem the axe. But something odd happened yesterday, the price for the HP touchpad dropped to $100(16gb) and $150(32gb) and they all got snatched up. So I thought maybe I could find one on the cheap like on craigslist and to my surprise they are listed for 300. So a few weeks ago no one wanted this product then HP kills it people get upset and them there is a fire sale that some how make it worth it's original value.  So this is all very confusing to me at the moment because it really doesn't make any sense. I could see trying to flip it for say 150 to 200 but full retail no I think not. What many of these knuckle heads forgot is that no one wanted them before and now the ecosystem has been given the corporate axe there is even less value in the product. People don't just buy hardware anymore they buy into a ecosystem populated by developers and right now the landscape for the Touchpad is something blank and empty.

Even when I look into the app store through my pre I really never see much useful and without any clear sign of continuation of development for webos the product stands impotent and without much purpose. But looking back I remember one of the coolest things about my pre. Early on there weren't many apps but you could go through homebrew and hack your phone to do other things. Now I'm not sure how many touchpads have been move in the last few weeks but could there be a user defined tablet experience? I think the key would have to be a dev community willing to take the touchpad like a linux computer and keep working on it and make it a truly open source tablet. Sure I don't think this would have much to offer for the masses but there are a fair number of people that use linux and for them the option to continue with an open source party on a tablet would be pretty exciting.

So I'm going to wait for the next version of the iPad, I looking for a decent camera and a little higher res if I can, why? Because I am buying into the ecosystem and I don't need to be an early adopter anymore. I want to turn my tablet on and have some options for programs to run and saying that I already have a slew of apps I already want for the iPad but I just can't bring myself to buying one at this date. Would I buy a touchpad for $100 you know what I would have to give it some thought, it would be an alright way to browse the web but what else would I do with it? And there is the dilemma there isn't anything all that great I can do with a system that is for all purposes dead.