Here comes China: $95 Cortex-A9 Android tablet (video review)

but i suspect that the n900 capacitive was high quality then your average cheep as chips chinese tablet so the comparison is probably useless.

I have two of that device's immediate predecessor, the $100 WM8505, and I support this assertion.

I've used them mostly for messing around, reverse engineering, and playing with and actually hacking on (most of mine spend most of their time in pieces with a serial header soldered on them.)

They're fun for that, although even that can be a little tiring due to (a) crappy hardware quality, (b) crappy vendorware closed software.

Like I said, it's possible the bootloader starts up at @250Mhz or so and leaves the kernel to later switch up to 800Mhz. I don't know why you'd design a board like that though (normally you want to boot nice and quick), but you never know.

Also, even though cpufreq reports in Mhz those values will be extrapolated in the kernel from a base frequency & clock multiplier registers somewhere else, so it can easily be out by a constant factor.

Once some benchmarks come out it should become more obvious if there's anything to this.

There exists evidence that it's happening already: xbox360 and ps3 are quite old, but still selling very well, despite PCs growing more and more powerful (a longer gap than previous generations); the popularity of nintendo wii (though I believe sales are much less now); the popularity of simple online flash games; the popularity of xbox "arcade" games (some of which were web games). This has been discussed on HN before.

If your customers don't need more performance, it doesn't matter how more you offer them. Yes, disruption.