I suspect that may be more to do with how far from reality the courier "demo reels" were.

People seem to think that courier was really doing all that stuff on the bench, whereas the far more likely reality was that the courier project had these amazing goals but it was nowhere near the concepts. Remember the courier pictures of two windows mobile devices glued into a leather folio from 2009?

If you were as cynical as me, you might think that the concept videos were leaked by the courier team to try and drum up some customer "pull" that would help them get internal support to enlarge their team 10x to actually make the product's functionality approach the demo.