Crunchpad killed amid a flurry of lawsuits promised - Update2

Michael Arrington kills his Crunchpad due to a breakdown of communications (and opposing goals) with partner Fusion Garage.

Arrington details the mess in this story, and the gist of it is in these two paragraphs:

' But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.

Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple. '

Neither company, Arrington says, owns the intellectural property of the Crunchpad outright and only TechCrunch holds the trademark.  In the meantime there've been no statements from the other side, and all we have is this.

I just read it and there are 957 comments since early morning.  Quite skeptical ones.  Doesn't actually sound like The End to me but a last grasp for control.  Sad to see, as it was a promising gizmo, though the price could never have been as low as Arrington insisted it could be done and the estimates had continued to grow.  Inordinately dramatic ending that's reminiscent of a bad movie.

And, an Update following that last thought: CNET Asia has some links to discussions of all this, and a caution: it's not exactly politically correct.

Also, Update2, Information Week has an interesting perspective on this, remembering the original goals of the project.