So what does that make webOS? If I take the Linux kernel, and put webkit on top, in what way would it be different to webOS?

Launcher, notification manager, settings manager, appstore, developer kit, consistent theming and widgets, etc etc etc.

You know, all that stuff that Linux users have a hard time caring about but really appeal to regular people and devs.

None of this really seems to clear up my confusion.

I guess my question is closer to, how is webOS hard to duplicate? How is it special?

As someone who's never actually had a webOS device, I've been given little reason to think about them, so I might just be missing how polished it is or something. This still points to a major marketing problem, though. HP hasn't told the world why it should care about webOS.

"how is webOS hard to duplicate? How is it special?"

Couldn't you say that about any OS that's based on open source software? WebOS's big differentiator is things like UI, which are difficult to duplicate well.

That would still leave you with a) Writing shims so that you can expose things like cameras, gps etc via api hooks b) Write a consistent UI story so that people are not writing raw html/css c) Come up with a good native app strategy for the cases where performance matters

At the root of it most problems drill down to basic engineering - lots and lots of it.

Let's put it this way, ChromeOS is a lot like webOS except in a much larger form factor.