Would the (supposedly) stable gingerbread roms that are out there right now work the same as REAL gingerbread (in the sense that gingerbread is supposedly snappier and has better/faster touch response)?
Android is part of a Free/Open Source Software movement.
Google derived Android from Linux (actually, it's more of specialized port than a derivation, maybe - depends if you're looking at it from a software or legal point of view).
As such, when at the right point, Google puts the Android code into a publicly accessible repository called the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository.
The Gingerbread roms that are out now have taken the operating system upgrades from that repository and are refining those non-transportable parts for our phones:
- the kernel
- the device drivers (I'll just include radio support here, even if that's not canonically correct, it's close enough for this post)
- any app mix that the rom developer prefers over those of Google's - or in our case, HTC's - choices for the final distribution
I'm not personally aware that 2.3 has snappier touch response - 2.2 with the right kernel certainly seemed to on our Evos. Gingerbread certainly has performance improvements - some of which are expressed in terms of gaming features.
I've not looked since before the 25th, but I'm not aware that there are Evo-specific 2.3 distributions with all phone hardware features working.
Coming very soon, perhaps, but today - really?
HTC has said that Gingerbread can co-exist nicely with Sense.
We're going to have to wait until the rumors die to see if that's indeed true for our Evos and the new Sense - no telling what hardware requirements (I'm looking at you, 512 MB ram) will be needed.
I'm guessing that we'll be ok, fwiw - and that it's coming sooner than many think. But - that's strictly a personal opinion, not a fact of life.