My gosh, i'm enjoying this intelligent debate, I tip my hat to you sir....
I think you'll find that the last decade of power wars is going to start to come to a close. Cafe and Euro Cap are about to come down like a plauge of locusts
Agreed, the flip side of this, is there's only so much power that is reasonable to put in untrained hands on public roads, My friends new M5 disappoints him, he always wanted one yet one thing or another has had him buy escalades, 7 series, 550i, A5, anyways he finally gets one and its so ungodly powerful, that its lost a lot of its fun, limits so high its boring unless driven way illegally, and you always catch up with traffic right before things get interesting, he feels he would have been most satisfied with an M5 two M5's ago, and misses his 750li m-sport that he traded in on the M5. like the saying goes "it's more fun to drive a slow car fast, than a fast car slow"
You just need something that's somewhat comparable, if everything else is great then that makes up for it.
I would agree with this in an ideal world, yet what i hear too often is "this is a Cadillac?!!!!!" this surprise in strangers at random places i go tells me that the word isn't out that Cadillac is making these types of cars (they are relatively new at it), which leads me to the thought that the value may not be there because of this. so price/performance being equal buyers are more likely to buy what they're familiar with as a sports sedan. so a tweak in the value, same for slightly less money, or more for same money, might turn heads Cadillac way.
I would remind you that phones are created by technology companies of which very few actually just build phones. The software that works so well is made by Apple and Google, and I must reinforce that none of these companies design hardware cycles for the length of time a car sees, or the condition a cars sees, and the ones that make the software, make it one of their primary products.
CUE is more the result of a development time that is twice the length of this rather than GM not knowing what they're doing. Hardware is easy, it's software that's the hard part, and the software that works which you suggest they take a page from, also is backed by companies with 10 fold the net worth of GM global combined, they also don't have to design a car in the mean time.
Alan Mullaly (ford CEO, ex Boeing exec) is quoted in an interview with Leo Laporte at CES as saying when asked why he was at CES something like 'the modern car company in this day and age is a tech company and its important to keep up'.
and net worth, is just numbers on a ledger, it's not the people and talent, which when you compare Apple/Google the highest valued companies engineering staff, to GM's it is Apple/Google that is dwarfed, keep in mind, GM built the lunar rover (Delco), they're one of the owners of Direct tv (owned by Hughes, which is owned by Raytheon, which is partly owned by GM), Raytheon, Onstar, XM, not to mention their traditional engine, chassis, manufacturing, engineers. the sheer talent they could tap into is mind boggling. GM's ceo could practically pick up the phone and ask for the software that could enable him to target a fly and knock a wing off of it with a slingshot from across the a parking lot, all while streaming audio to just about every GM car with XM and have a video feed to sat tv viewers. my thought of buying a phone company is to bolster them in the area of consumer electronics, and help focus GM in the Mullaly defined arena of cars as tech.
EDIT... that being said, i recall several years ago reading that Google has more engineering PHD's on staff than anybody, so you have a very good point on that front.
EDIT #2
just stumbled across this
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57592188-94/app-store-in-the-drivers-seat-here-comes-your-next-car/