you, and most of the others are looking at it the wrong way IMO. It was obvious a long time ago that they would not be able to deliver as first planned. Who ever is at least a bit into all of this knew that there was zero chance to have it done by that first date since they had to do EVERYTHING. Find blobs free HW that can be used in mobile phone and then write the whole OS and all apps. Well, they used gnome so a lot of it was there but still needed A LOT of work to make it work on 5ˇscreen and touch only.
And then was a delay. And another one. And another one.....
Basically what they did is pushed something/anything that at least resembles what they promised just to keep the thing going. Otherwise, if they waited to make all they wanted to be as they wanted, everybody else would forget that they ever anounced a phone at all. And now, while this first batch might be a total crap it is at least something that resembles in SW and HW what they wanted to achieve and is a lot easier to go from this point on.
Will they make it all work by the fourth batch? No way IMO. But now they have some sort of real life device so it's easier to spot all the wrongs and make them right which would not be possible on developer boards. After all, every company has prototypes, some even get stolen or lost, but all of them work with much more standardized HW so all that looks much more like finished product.