Google really needs to sort it out. It's a shonky user experience that really doesn't need it to be. I was certain that it was hardware acceleration that was missing, but obviously not. There was that bug ticket which indicated that Google thought it was garbage-collector related, but then that was supposed to have been modified in 2.3.
It's really pretty poor, and is certainly not helping to sell devices. Put an iPad 2 next to a Xoom, or a Nexus One next to an iPhone 4, and you really do see the difference. In stores like Best Buy, that's how they're setting up displays, of the two "flagship products". And I'm sure customers are going to go with the Apple product after trying them both.
(Don't get me wrong, it's a valid criticism. But it's not even remotely close to the reason people choose an iPhone over an Android-based phone, or vis-versa).
I'm an iOS developer and an Android developer, and I'm honestly disgusted by the level of excuses that is made for the horrible UX on Android. It reminds me of 10 years ago, when the meme on /. was "The Year Of Desktop Linux is always Next Year(TM)".
some operations behave differently when hardware acceleration enabled
So they've been conservative. I kind of wish they hadn't - 3.0 is a big enough version jump that people understand there's going to be a few glitches, and there are almost certainly a large number of apps that don't use any of the small number of listed APIs that change their behavior under hardware acceleration. Those apps that do use the APIs could be autodetected I would have thought and have hardware acceleration disabled automatically.