It's an interesting point, about which Oracle might argue entertainingly. e.g. if a market has a limited life, then 2 days delay means 2 days less to make money (markets don't last forever). e.g. being earlier to market is well known to does make a difference for getting a foothold in a market (mindshare, word of mouth, technical feedback, supplier relations), but especially because you are judged relative to your competitors - releasing your next version before their next version helps you win.

Except that Android's first release was a beta and SDK, almost a full year before phones shipped.

From that, it's not remotely clear whether saving 2 days to beta would have even resulted in 2 days of savings in the creation of any device.

To say nothing of whether Google/TMobile/HTC pre-selected a launch date in advance for the Dream, in which case they easily may have squandered a handful of days waiting for their desired PR timing.

Furthermore, adding two days' development time doesn't mean shipping two days later, especially if that time is spent reimplementing functionality for which you already have a perfectly useful (although not shippable) alternative.

All it means is you'd have had to allocate two more days worth of some programmer's time away from some less important task. For something like this, the programmer wouldn't even need to know thing one about the Android project - just that "we need our own implementation of this standard Java function".