Oh, HP, never willing to admit the truth. You know what's a REAL problem? You, HP. That's right. Every time someone asks me to recommend a laptop, my first sentence is "Do not buy HP". Their products are cheap underperforming poorly built ugly garbage. The ONLY two decent products is their printers and an HP Folio 13'' ultrabook (but even THAT they messed up by putting a lame "clickpad" that annoys me so on MacBooks!). All other HP laptops I worked with are disgusting. Don't blame Intel or MS for your failure. The latter screwed up a lot but it has nothing to do with you. HP used to be insanely popular back in PDA days, they had best value for money and quality, my HP PDA *still* works, even after not using it for years. Where is that innovation now? Do we see unique, outstanding in ANY way products from HP? No we don't. And that's why the company deserves and will die, at least in that sector of the market.
Personally, I don't think WebOS would make such a difference. It might have been good, but too many people were already caught up with Apple - it took years of aggressive marketing by Samsung and Google to conquer the market for Android. A third competing OS... we all know what kind of market share it would have, just look at Windows mobile. No, despicable build quality and lack of interesting products in already-existing parts of the market is what failed HP and they're NOT learning a lesson from it, instead whining about how it's all MS and Intel fault.
Southernshark - Intel has delivered many viable mobile chips lately, namely their ULV Haswell i5s and i7s. They might not go into phones and tablets yet but they go into convertibles with very decent battery life and great performance for such a puny device. As for decent graphics, even now they already have HD 5200 aka Iris Pro - it makes all lower-end discrete GPUs obsolete since it can compete with GT620 (so forget all low-end AMD garbage and so on). For most consumers, that's more than good enough. Don't expect that integrated graphics will somehow magically catch up with discrete, that's not happening.