My 5 year old android-tablet has more ram and cpu than the gen2 remarkable. So I assume they outsourced parts to the cloud simply because it's not running well enough on the tablet itself.

> the rest of the system is linux

Linux, especially on tablets is very exotic. There is no way to benefit from the big ecosystem on android or iOS. Everything must come from the users, the company or regulary desktop-linux, which is not optimized for tabled or eInk. Linux is a good selling point for hackers and nerds, but irrelevant for casual users.