while i was initially unimpressed with the thunderbolt, I am equally impressed with verizon's other new phones. It seems the technology for LTE is not at a point that allows it to play nicely with dual core yet. Only one I see with a dual core out of the 4 released is the bionic, and we don't know for sure if thats Tegra2 or OMAP.... also the bionic has a few specs that are less than the Thunderbolt, 5 mpixel camera, VGA FFC and no DLNA.... lets not forget the major wins the thunderbolt has over every other 4g LTE phone being released. The ONLY thing it doesnt stack up to with the Bionic is its lack of dual core, but compare it to the Sammy and LG offerings, and its right up there even with a few extras.
Plus, since I'm a dev, knowing the history with qualcom, and the fact that a majority of the phones out there still are qualcom devices, that makes me very enthusiastic for a quick root and major dev opportunities for the thunderbolt.
Lets not also forget that the evo and now inc battery charging issues have been fixed by the dev community, including myself. From my perspective, since I'm tthrowing out the Sammy and LG since they have nothing to offer over the thunderbolt, here's how I compare the Bionic and Thunderbolt:
Bionic:
Encrypted bootloader, best we can hope for is bootstrapped root and a few custom ROMs.
Small dev community.
No chance at a custom kernel, so should we have any of these hardware issues (bad battery life etc) the dev community cant fix them
Thunderbolt:
Probably very similar if not identical bootloader to G2/MT4G, both fully cracked with S-OFF.
HTC still has a very large dev community.
99 % apps work with qualcom devices whereas more like a general 80 if you're lucky on others.
No motoblur... just eww... personal opinion (not that I'm a fan of sense either, I use AOSP)
Custom kernels (including one by me) to fix any annoyances.
Seems like a pretty clear choice to me.